The Right Attitude to Rain

B O O K S B Y A L E X A N D E R M c C A L L S M I T H

I N T H E I S A B E L D A L H O U S I E S E R I E S

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The Right Attitude to Rain

I N T H E N O . 1 L A D I E S ’ D E T E C T I V E A G E N C Y S E R I E S

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Blue Shoes and Happiness

I N T H E P O R T U G U E S E I R R E G U L A R V E R B S S E R I E S

Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

I N T H E 4 4 S C O T L A N D S T R E E T S E R I E S

44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa T H E R I G H T A T T I T U D E T O R A I N

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T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E

T O R A I N

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h p a n t h e o n b o o k s

n e w y o r k

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc. and Edward Mendelson, Executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden, for permission to reprint excerpts from “Heavy Date,” “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” and “Funeral Blues,” by W. H. Auden from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and the Estate of W. H. Auden.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCall Smith, Alexander, [date]

The right attitude to rain / Alexander McCall Smith.

p. cm.

eISBN-13: 978-0-375-42462-5

eISBN-10: 0-375-42462-8

1. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction. 2. Women editors—Fiction.

3. Housekeepers—Fiction. 4. Americans—Scotland—

Edinburgh—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.C326R54 2006

823’.914—dc22

2006043214

www.pantheonbooks.com

v1.0

This book is for Edward Mendelson

T H E R I G H T A T T I T U D E T O R A I N

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C H A P T E R O N E

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TO TAKE AN INTEREST in the affairs of others is entirely natural; so natural, in fact, that even a cat, lying cat-napping on top of a wall, will watch with half an eye the people walking by below. But between such curiosity, which is permissible, and nosiness, which is not, there lies a dividing line that some people simply miss—even if it is a line that is painted red and marked by the very clearest of warning signs.

Isabel adjusted the position of her chair. She was sitting in the window of the Glass and Thompson café at the top of Dundas Street—where it descended sharply down the hill to Canonmills. From that point in the street, one could see in the distance the hills of Fife beyond: dark-green hills in that light, but at times an attenuated blue, softened by the sea—always changing. Isabel liked this café, where the display windows of the shop it had once been had now been made into sitting areas for customers. Edinburgh was normally too chilly to allow people to sit out while drinking their coffee, except for a few short weeks in the high summer when café life spilled out onto the pavement, tentatively, as if expecting a rebuff from the ele-4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h ments. This was a compromise—to sit in the window, protected by glass, and yet feel part of what was going on outside.

She edged her chair forwards in order to see a little more of what was happening on the other side of the road, at a slight angle. Dundas Street was a street of galleries. Some were well established, such as the Scottish Gallery and the Open Eye, others were struggling to make a living on the work of young artists who still believed that great things lay ahead. Most of them would be disappointed, of course, as they discovered that the world did not share their conviction, but they tried nonetheless, and continued to try. One of these smaller galleries was hosting an opening and Isabel could see the crowd milling about within. At the front door stood a small knot of smokers, drawing on cigarettes, bound together in their exclusion. She strained to make out the features of one of them, a tall man wearing a blue jacket, who was talking animatedly to a woman beside him, gesturing to emphasise some private point. He looked vaguely familiar, she decided, but it was difficult to tell from that distance and angle. Suddenly the man in the blue jacket stopped gesturing, reached forward and rested a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She moved sideways, as if to shrug him off, but he held on tight. Her hand went up in what seemed to be an attempt to prise off his fingers, but all the time she was smiling—Isabel could see that. Strange, she thought; an argument conducted in the language of smiles.

But more intriguing still: an expensive car, one of those discreet cars of uncertain make but with unambiguous presence, had drawn up on the café side of the street, just below the level of Isabel’s window. It had stopped and a man and a woman had emerged. They were in a no-parking zone, and Isabel watched as the man pressed the device on his key ring that would lock the T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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doors automatically. You are allowed to drop things off, thought Isabel, but not park. Don’t you know that? And then she thought: People who drive cars like that consider themselves above the regulations, the rules that prevent those with humbler cars, and shallower pockets, from parking. And these people, of course, can afford the parking fines; small change for them. She found herself feeling irritated, and her irritation became, after a few moments, animosity. She found herself disliking them, this man and woman standing beside their expensive car, because of their arrogance.

She looked down into her coffee cup, and then up again.

No, she thought. This is wrong. You should not dislike people you do not know. And she knew nothing about them, other than that they appeared to imagine that their wealth entitled them to ignore the regulations by which the rest of us had to abide. But then they might not know that one could not park there because they were from somewhere else; from a place where a double yellow line might be an invitation to park, for all she knew. And even as she thought this, she realised that of course they were not from Edinburgh. Their clothes were different, and their complexions too. These people had been in the sun somewhere, and their clothes had that cut, that freshly dry-cleaned look that Scottish clothes never seem to have. Scottish clothes are soft, a bit crumpled, lived-in, like Scottish people themselves really.

She craned her neck. The two of them, the man considerably older than the woman, were walking down the road, away from the car. They paused as the man pointed at a door, and the woman said something to him. Isabel saw her adjust the printed silk scarf around her neck and glance at the watch on her wrist, a small circle of gold that caught the sun as she moved her arm.

The man nodded and they climbed the steps that led into the 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Scottish Gallery. Isabel sat back in her seat. It was not remarkable in any way; a wealthy couple from somewhere else, driving into town, leaving their car where they should not—but out of ignorance rather than arrogance—and then going into one of the galleries. There was nothing particularly interesting about all that, except for one thing. Isabel had seen the man’s face, which was drawn up on one side from Bell’s palsy, producing the condition’s characteristic grimace. And the woman’s face had been, by contrast, a beautiful one—if one’s standards of beauty are the regular features of the Renaissance Madonna: soft, composed, feminine.

They are none of my business, she thought. And yet she had nothing to do until twelve o’clock—it was then ten-thirty in the morning—and she had been half thinking of going into the Scottish Gallery anyway. She knew the staff there, and they usually showed her something interesting by the Scottish artists she liked, a Peploe sketch, a Philipson nude, something by William Crosbie if she was in luck. If she went in now, she would see the couple at closer quarters and reach a more considered view. She had been wrong to dislike them, and she owed it to them now to find out a little bit more about them. So it was not pure curiosity, even if it looked like it; this was really an exercise in rectifying a mistaken judgement.

T H E E N T R A N C E TO the Scottish Gallery was a glass door, behind which a short set of open stairs led to the upper gallery, while a slightly longer set led down into a warren of basement exhibition spaces. These lower spaces were not dark, as base-ments could be, but brightly lit by strategically placed display lights, and brightened, too, by the splashes of colour on the T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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walls. Isabel went up and passed the desk of her friend Robin McClure to her right. He sat there with his list of prices and his catalogues, ready to answer questions. What impressed her about Robin was that although he could tell who bought paintings and who did not, he was civil to both. So those who wandered into the gallery because it was wet outside, or because they just wanted to look at art, would receive from him as courteous a welcome as those who wandered in with the intention of buying a painting or, in the case of those who were weaker, a readiness to be tempted to buy. That, thought Isabel, was what distinguished Dundas Street galleries from many of the expensive galleries in London and Paris, where bells had to be rung before the door was opened. And even then, once the door had been unlocked, the welcome, if it was a welcome, was grudging and suspicious.

Robin was not at his desk. She glanced around her. It was a general exhibition, one where a hotchpotch of works were displayed. The effect, thought Isabel, was pleasing, and her eye was drawn immediately to a large picture dominating one of the walls. Two figures were before a window, a man and a woman.

The man was staring out at a rural landscape, the woman looked in towards the room. Her face was composed, but there was a wistful sadness about it. She would like to be elsewhere, thought Isabel; as so many people would. How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment? Auden said something about that, she remembered, in his mountains poem.

He had said that the child unhappy on one side of the Alps might wish himself on the other. Well, he was right; only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.

She glanced about her. There were several people on the main floor of the gallery: a man in a blue overcoat, a scarf 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h around his neck, peering at a small painting near the window; a couple of middle-aged women wearing those green padded jackets that marked them immediately as leading, or at least aspiring to, the country life. They were sisters, Isabel decided, because they had the same prominent brow; sisters living together, thoroughly accustomed to each other, acting—almost thinking—in unison. But where were the man and the woman she had seen? She took a few steps forwards, away from the top of the stairs, and saw that they were standing in the small inner gallery that led off from the main floor. He was standing in front of a painting, consulting a catalogue; she was by the window staring out. It was the reverse of the large painting that she had spotted when she came in. She was looking out; he was looking in. But then it occurred to Isabel that in other respects the scene before her echoed the painting. This woman wanted to be elsewhere.

“Isabel?”

She turned round sharply. Robin McClure stood behind her, looking at her enquiringly. He reached out and put a hand lightly on her arm in a gesture of greeting.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re standing in awe before our offering. Overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.”

Isabel laughed. “Overcome.”

Robin, his hand still on her arm, guided her towards a small picture at the edge of the room. Isabel glanced over her shoulder into the smaller room; they were still there, although the man had now joined the woman at the window, where they seemed absorbed in conversation.

“Here’s something that will appeal to you,” said Robin.

“Look at that.”

Isabel knew immediately. “Alberto Morrocco?” she asked.

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Robin nodded. “You can see the influence, can’t you?”

It was not apparent to Isabel. She leaned forward to look more closely at the painting. A girl sat in a chair, one arm resting on a table, the other holding a book. The girl looked straight ahead; not at the viewer, but through him, beyond him. She was wearing a tunic of the sort worn by schoolgirls in the past, a grey garment, with thick folds in the cloth. Behind her, a curtain was blown by the wind from an open window.

“Remember Falling Leaves?” Robin prompted. “That painting by James Cowie?”

Isabel looked again at the painting. Yes. Schoolgirls. Cowie had painted schoolgirls, over and over, innocently, but the paintings had contained a hint of the anxious transition to adolescence.

“Morrocco studied under Cowie in Aberdeen,” Robin continued. “He later discovered his own palette and the bright colours came in. And the liveliness. But every so often he remembered who taught him.”

“Morrocco was a friend of your father’s, wasn’t he?” Isabel said. Scotland was like that; there were bonds and connections everywhere, sinews of association, and they were remembered.

Isabel had a painting by Robin’s father, David McClure; it was one of her favourites.

“Yes,” said Robin. “They were great friends. And I have known Morrocco ever since I can remember.”

Isabel reached out, as if to touch the surface of the painting.

“That awful cloth,” she said. “The stuff that schoolgirls had to wear.”

“Most uncomfortable,” said Robin. “Or so I imagine.”

Isabel pointed to the painting beside it, a small still life of a white-and-blue Glasgow jug. There was something familiar 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h about the style, but she could not decide what it was. Perhaps it was the jug itself; there were so many paintings of Glasgow jugs—to paint one, it seemed, had been a rite of passage, like going to Paris. Artists, she thought, were enthusiastic imitators, a thought that immediately struck her as unfair, she conceded to herself, because everyone was an enthusiastic imitator.

“Yes,” said Robin. “Well, there you are . . .” He turned his head. The man whom Isabel had seen had left the inner gallery and was standing a few steps away from Robin, wanting to speak, but reluctant to interrupt.

“Sir . . . ,” began Robin, then faltered. Isabel saw his expression, the slight air of being taken aback and the quick recovery.

And she thought: This is what this man must experience every time he meets somebody; the shock as the distorted face is registered and then follows the attempt to cover the reaction. She remembered how she had once had lunch with a young man, the nephew of a friend of hers, who had come to seek her advice about studying philosophy at university. She had met him for the first time in a restaurant. He had come in, a self-possessed, good-looking young man, and when they had moved to the table she had seen the scar which ran down the side of his cheek. He had said immediately: “I was bitten by a dog when I was a boy.

I was thirteen.” He had said that because he had known what she was thinking—how did it happen? Presumably everybody thought that and he supplied the answer right at the beginning, just to get it out of the way.

The man fingered his tie nervously. “I didn’t want to interrupt,” he said. Then, turning to Isabel, he repeated, “I’m sorry. I didn’t wish to interrupt.”

“We were just blethering,” said Robin, using the Scots word.

“Don’t worry.”

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He’s American, thought Isabel, from somewhere in the South. But it was difficult to tell these days because people moved about so much and accents had changed. And she thought of her late mother, suddenly, inconsequentially, her sainted American mother as she called her, who had spoken in the accent of the American South, and whose voice had faded in her memory, though it was still there, just.

She looked at the man and then quickly turned away. She was curious about him, of course, but if she held him in her gaze he would think that she was staring at his face. She moved away slightly, to indicate that he should talk to Robin.

“Isabel,” said Robin. “Would you mind?”

“Of course not,” said Isabel. “Of course not.”

She left Robin talking to the man while she went off to examine more paintings. She noticed that the woman had also come out of the smaller gallery and was now standing in front of an Elizabeth Blackadder oil of the Customs Building in Venice.

“Elizabeth Blackadder. She’s a very popular artist,” said Isabel casually. “Or at least on this side of the Atlantic. I’m not sure whether people know about her on your side.”

The woman was surprised. She turned to face Isabel. “Oh?”

she said. “Black what?”

“Blackadder,” said Isabel. “She lives here in Edinburgh.”

The woman looked back at the painting. “I like it,” she said.

“You know where you are with a painting like that.”

“Venice,” said Isabel. “That’s where you are.”

The woman was silent for a moment. She had been bending to look more closely at the painting; now she straightened up.

“How did you know that I was American?” she asked. Her tone was even, but it seemed to Isabel that there was an edge to her voice.

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“I was over there when your . . . your husband spoke,” she said quickly. “I assumed.”

“And assumed correctly,” said the woman. There was no warmth in her voice.

“You see,” continued Isabel, “I’m half-American myself.

Half-American, half-Scottish, although I’ve hardly ever spent any time in the States. My mother was from—”

“Will you excuse me?” said the woman suddenly. “My friend was asking about a painting. I’m interested to hear the answer.”

Isabel watched her as she walked across the gallery. Not married, she thought. Friend. It had been abrupt, but it had been said with a smile. Although Isabel felt rebuffed, she told herself that one does not have to continue a conversation with a stranger. A minimum level of politeness is required, a response to a casual remark, but beyond that one can disengage. She was interested in this couple, as to who they were and what they were doing in Edinburgh, but she thought: I mean nothing to them. And why should I?

She went to look at another painting—three boys in a boat on a loch somewhere, absorbed in the mastery of the oars, the youngest looking up at the sky at something he had seen there.

The artist had caught the expression of wonderment on the young boy’s face and the look of concentration on the faces of his companions; that was how artists responded to the world—

they gaze and then re-create it in paint. Artists were allowed to do that—to look, to gaze at others and try to find out what it was that they were feeling—but we, who were not artists, were not.

If one looked too hard that would be considered voyeurism, or nosiness, which is what Cat, her niece, had accused her of more than once. Jamie—the boyfriend rejected by Cat but kept on by T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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Isabel as a friend—had done the same, although more tactfully.

He had said that she needed to draw a line in the world with me written on one side and you on the other. Me would be her business; you would be the business of others, and an invitation would be required to cross the line.

She had said to Jamie: “Not a good idea, Jamie. What if people on the other side of the line are in trouble?”

“That’s different,” he said. “You help them.”

“By stretching a hand across this line of yours?”

“Of course. Helping people is different.”

She had said: “But then we have to know what they need, don’t we? We have to be aware of others. If we went about concerned with only our own little world, how would we know when there was trouble brewing on the other side of the line?”

Jamie had shrugged. He had only just thought of the line and he did not think that he would be able to defend it against Isabel in Socratic mood. So he said, “What do you think of Arvo Pärt, Isabel? Have I ever asked you that?”

A F T E R S H E H A D F I N I S H E D her business in town, Isabel decided to walk back to the house. It was by then afternoon, and the sunshine of early June, now with a bit of warmth in it, had brought people out onto the streets in their shirtsleeves and blouses, optimistic, but resigned to being driven back in by rain, or mist, or other features of the Scottish summer. Her walk back, like any walk through this city, was to her an exercise in association. One would have to have one’s eyes closed in Edinburgh not to be assailed by reminders of the past, she thought—

the public or personal past. She paused at the corner of the 1 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h High Street where the statue of Edinburgh’s most famous philosopher, David Hume, had been placed. What a disaster, she thought. Isabel admired Hume and agreed with Adam Smith’s view that he approached as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will per-mit. But the good David was a natty dresser, interested in fine clothes (there was Allan Ramsey’s portrait to prove that), and here he was, seated in a chair, wearing a toga, of all things. And there were some who had voiced further objections. Hume was a reader, they said, and yet here he was merely holding a book, not reading it. But what, she wondered, would the statue have looked like if he had been portrayed in elegant clothes with his nose stuck in a volume of Locke? There would have been objections to that too, no doubt. This was the public past, about which we often disagree.

She walked back across the Meadows, a wide expanse of common ground on which people strolled and played. To the south, along the edge of the park, rose the high Victorian tene-ments of Marchmont, stone buildings of six floors or so, topped with spiky adornments—thistles, fleurs-de-lis and the like.

There were attics up there, rooms looking out of the sharply rising slate roofs, out towards the Forth and the hills beyond, rooms let out to students and later, during the summer, to the musicians and actors who flocked to Edinburgh for the Festival.

As she walked up towards Bruntsfield she could make out the door that led to the narrow hall and, up five long flights of stone stairs, to the flat where more than twenty years ago her school-friend Kirsty had at sixteen conducted an affair with a student from Inverness, her first boyfriend and lover. Isabel had listened to her friend’s accounts of this and had felt an emptiness in the T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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pit of her stomach, which was longing, and fear too. Kirsty had spoken sotto voce of what had happened, and whispered, “They try to stop us, Isabel. They try to stop us because they don’t want us to know. And then we find out . . .”

“And?” Isabel had said. But Kirsty had become silent and looked out of the window. This was the private past; intimate, unquestioned, precious to each of us.

Reaching Bruntsfield, she found herself outside Cat’s delicatessen. She could not walk past without going in, although she tried not to distract Cat when she was busy. That time in the afternoon was a slack period, and there was only one customer in the shop, who was in the process of paying for a baguette and a tub of large pitted olives. There were several tables where people could sit and be served coffee and a small selection of food, and Isabel took a seat at one of these, picking up an out-of-date copy of Corriere della Sera from the table of newspapers and magazines beside the cheese counter. She glanced at the political news from Italy, which appeared to be a series of reports of battles between acronyms, or so it seemed. Behind the acronyms there were people, and passions, and ancient feuds, but without any idea of what stood for which, it was much like the battle between the Blues and Greens in Byzantium—meaningless, unless one understood the difference between the orthodox and the Monophysites who stood behind these factions.

She abandoned the paper. Eddie, Cat’s shy assistant, to whom something traumatic had happened that Isabel had never fathomed, took the money for the baguette and the olives and opened the door for the customer. There was no sign of Cat.

“Where is she?” asked Isabel, once they had the shop to themselves.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Eddie came over to the table, rubbing his hands on his apron. His nervousness in Isabel’s presence had abated, but he was still not completely at ease.

“She went out for lunch,” he said. “And she hasn’t come back yet.”

Isabel looked at her watch. “A long lunch,” she remarked.

Eddie hesitated for a moment, as if weighing up whether to say anything. “With her new boyfriend,” he said, adding, after further hesitation, “Again.”

Isabel reached for the folded Corriere della Sera and aligned it with the edge of the table, a distracted gesture, but one which gave her time to absorb this information. She had resolved not to become involved in the question of her niece’s boyfriends, but it was difficult to remain detached. Cat’s short-lived engagement to Toby had led to a row between Isabel and her niece—

a row which had been quickly patched up, but which had made Isabel reflect on the need to keep her distance on the issue. So when Cat had gone to Italy to attend a wedding and had been followed back by an elegant Italian considerably older than she was, Isabel had refrained from saying very much. Cat decided not to encourage her Italian visitor, and he had responded by flirting with Isabel. She had been flattered in spite of herself, and tempted too, but he had not really meant it; flirtation, it seemed, was mere politeness, a way of passing the time.

The only boyfriend of Cat’s of whom she approved was Jamie, the bassoonist, whom Cat had disposed of fairly quickly, but who had continued to hanker after her in the face of every discouragement. Isabel had been astonished by his constancy to a cause that was clearly hopeless. Cat had told him bluntly that there was no future for them as a couple, and while he respected her and kept his distance, he secretly—and someT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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times not so secretly—hoped that she would change her mind.

Isabel could not understand why Cat should have abandoned Jamie. In her view, he was everything, and more, that a woman could want. He was striking in appearance, with his high cheek-bones, his dark hair that he tended to wear short, and his Mediterranean, almost olive complexion; unusual colouring for a Scotsman, perhaps, but one which in her eyes was fatally attractive. And he was gentle too, which added to his appeal. Yet Cat spelled it out to Isabel in unambiguous terms: I do not love him, Isabel. I do not love him. It’s as simple as that.

If Cat was not prepared to love Jamie, then Isabel was.

There was a gap of fourteen years between them, and Isabel realised that at Jamie’s age this was significant. Would a young man in his twenties want to become involved with a woman who was in her early forties? Some women of that age had younger lovers—and there was nothing shameful about it, but she suspected that it was the women who started such affairs, rather than the young men. Of course, there might be some young men who would be looking for the equivalent of a sugar daddy, and who would seek out an older woman who could pay the bills and provide some diversion, but most young men were not like that, unless, as sometimes happened, they were looking for their mother.

Isabel could never have Jamie; she could never possess him, precisely because she loved him and she wanted what was best for him. And what was best for him was undoubtedly that he should meet somebody his own age, or thereabouts, and make his life with her. Of course that was best for him, she told herself. He would be a good father, he would be a good husband; he did not need to anchor himself to somebody older than him.

He did not. But she still loved Jamie, and at times she loved him 1 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h achingly; but she controlled that, and only occasionally, in private, did the tears come for what just could not be. At least she had his friendship, and that was something for which she felt grateful. She did not have his love, she thought. He is fond of me, but he does not return what I feel for him. Let the more loving one be me, wrote Auden, and Isabel thought, Yes, that is what I feel: let the more loving one be me. And it is.

She would not interfere, but who was this new boyfriend?

She looked up at Eddie. Could he be jealous? she asked herself.

The tone of his voice had sounded resentful, and she supposed that it was quite possible that he saw the arrival of a new man as being in some way a threat to his relationship with Cat. She was kind to him; she encouraged him; she was the ideal employer.

Eddie could not expect to amount to much in Cat’s eyes, but at least he was there, in her life, somehow, and he would not want that to come to an end.

“Well, Eddie,” said Isabel. “That’s interesting news. I hadn’t heard. Who is this new man?”

“He’s called Patrick,” said Eddie. He put his hand a good six inches above his head. “He’s about so high. Maybe a bit less.

Fair hair.”

Isabel nodded. Cat inevitably went for tall, good-looking men. It was all very predictable. “This Patrick,” she asked, “do you like him?”

She studied Eddie’s reaction. But he was watching her too, and he grinned. “You want me to say that I don’t,” he said.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it? Because you won’t like him.”

We all underestimate Eddie, thought Isabel. “I’ll try to like him, Eddie,” she said. “I’ll really try.”

Eddie looked sideways at her. “He’s not bad, actually. I T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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quite like him, you know. He’s not like the others. Not much, anyway.”

This interested Isabel. Perhaps Cat was breaking the pattern. “Why?” she asked.

The door opened and a woman with a shopping bag came in. Eddie glanced over his shoulder at the customer and gave his hands a last wipe on his apron. “I’m going to have to go,” he said.

“I’ll make you a coffee, if you like. After I’ve served this person.”

Isabel glanced at her watch. “I’m going to have to go too,”

she said. “But I’ve got time for a quick cup. And then you can tell me about him. You can tell me why you like him.”

A S I S A B E L WA L K E D B AC K along Merchiston Crescent, back to her house in one of those quiet roads that led off to the right, she thought about what Eddie had told her. In their brief conversation he had opened up more than he had ever done with her before. He had told her why he had disliked Toby, who condescended to him, who made him feel . . . “Well,” he said, “he made me feel not quite a man, if you know what I mean.” Isabel did; she knew precisely what Toby would have thought of Eddie and how he would have conveyed his feelings. And then Eddie had said, “Patrick is more like me, I think. I don’t know why, but that’s what I feel. I just feel it.”

That intrigued Isabel. It told her something—that Patrick was an improvement on Toby—that was information of some significance, but she still could not visualise him. Eddie had thought that Patrick was more like him, but she found it difficult to imagine that Cat would deign to look at somebody really like Eddie. No, what it did convey was that there was more of 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the feminine in Patrick than there had been in Toby, or any of the others. Another possibility, of course, was that Patrick was simply more sympathetic than the others, and Eddie had seized on this. One can be masculine and sympathetic, and that, perhaps, was what Patrick was.

She turned the corner and started to walk down her road.

Walking towards her, having just parked his car in the street, was one of the students who attended lectures in Colinton Road nearby. Isabel caught his eye as they passed. He was masculine and sympathetic. But then she thought: I have no evidence for that conclusion—none at all; apart, perhaps, from the fact that he smiled at me, just a hint of a smile—and the smile was one of those little signals we flash to one another: I understand. Yes, I understand.

C H A P T E R T W O

E

ISABEL CALLED GRACE a housekeeper. She used that term because it was frankly kinder than the other words on offer: to call somebody a cleaner suggested that the job was a menial one—a matter of dusting and polishing and mopping up. And the words daily and domestic were adjectives used as nouns, and whether or not it was this that gave them a dismissive ring, she thought that they sounded that way. Housekeeper, by contrast, implied a job of responsibility and importance—which it was.

One kept a house, just as one might keep a zoo, or indeed a collection of paintings. To be the keeper of anything, thought Isabel, was an honourable calling; she had no time for the tendency to look down on jobs involving physical labour. Lawyers and accountants had a good conceit of themselves, she felt, but why should they consider themselves superior to bus drivers and the people who kept the streets clean? She could see no reason. So Grace, who came to Isabel’s house every day to clean and tidy and put things back in their place, was called a housekeeper by Isabel, and generously paid. Isabel’s father, for whom Grace had worked during his final illness, had asked Isabel to ensure that Grace was looked after, and Isabel had given her 2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h word that she would be, even to the extent, now, of setting out to buy a flat for her. Grace rented, which Isabel thought was a waste of money, and subject to the vagaries of landlords. But when she had raised the matter with Grace, and offered to buy a flat, she discovered a curious inertia on Grace’s part. Yes, it would be very nice one day to have a flat, and yes, she would look, but nothing was ever done. So Isabel had decided she would do it. She would look for something suitable and set Grace up in it.

She could easily afford to do this. Isabel was discreet about her financial position, but the Louisiana and Gulf Land Company, a large part of which she had inherited through her mother, had done and continued to do well. There was no shortage of funds, as the quarterly statement of assets from the Northern Trust revealed. These statements came from an alien land—from the land of money, a world of figures, of profit-earnings ratios, of bonds, of projections that meant little to Isabel. But she understood very well this world’s siren call, and she resisted it. Money could claim one’s allegiances very quickly; this happened all the time. It was like a drug: the hit faded and more was needed for the same high. So she did not think about it, and she quietly gave away much of her income, unnoticed, uncomplimented; she was often the anonymous at the end of lists of donors; that was her.

Grace was older than Isabel, but not by much—forty-six to Isabel’s forty-two. These four years, though, were important, as they reinforced her tendency to question Isabel’s judgement from time to time. Four years’ seniority in adult life was nothing, whatever it may count for in childhood; yet these four years gave Grace the advantage of Isabel—in Grace’s view. She thought her employer’s view of the world was unduly theoretical and T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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that one day it would be moderated by experience. But that experience, she felt, was slow to come.

The next morning Isabel was eager to tell Grace about Cat’s new boyfriend, but the conversation started off in a totally different direction. Guests were expected the following week and arrangements had to be made. Grace did not like visitors to be sprung upon her; she wanted to know exactly who was arriving, why they were coming, and when they would leave. After this had been sorted out, then the details could be addressed: which room they would stay in, what meals would be required, and so on.

“You mentioned guests,” said Grace as she slipped out of her blue macintosh and hung it on the peg behind the kitchen door. “Next week, isn’t it?”

Isabel, rising from the kitchen table where she had been attempting the first few clues of the Scotsman crossword, put down her pencil. “Yes,” she said. “Mimi and Joe. And they’re coming for just under a month. They’ll be going on to Oxford for a while and then back to Dallas.”

Grace moved over to the sink and reached for her blue washing-up gloves. “Mimi and Joe? The ones who were here three or four years ago?”

Isabel nodded. Mimi McKnight was her cousin, her mother’s first cousin, to be precise, and she and her husband, Joe, had visited her some years ago. Grace had met them then and, as far as Isabel remembered, got on well with them. There was no point in having guests with whom Grace disagreed: that could be disastrous.

Grace picked up a plate from the drying rack and examined it. Isabel had washed it, and it might have to be washed again.

But the specks she saw turned out to be part of the design and 2 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h it was set aside for shelving. She picked up another plate. This one was definitely still dirty, and the discovery pleased Grace.

Isabel thought that she could wash up, but she was really no good at it, according to Grace. She had no idea how to load the dishwasher correctly and was always putting things away half-washed. She looked at the plate again, ostentatiously, so that Isabel might see her scrutiny. “A month?” she said as she began to fill the sink with water. “That’s a long stay.”

“She’s my cousin,” said Isabel. “Cousins can stay indefinitely, and sometimes do. They’re different.”

“I wouldn’t care to be away from my own bed for a month,”

said Grace. “And I wouldn’t put up with a cousin who stayed indefinitely.”

“Mimi and Joe are different,” said Isabel. “I like having them to stay. And . . .” She was about to say, “And they’re my guests, after all,” but stopped herself. It was no business of Grace’s how long her guests should stay (and that plate is not dirty, she thought), but that was not the way the house, or Isabel’s life, was ordered. Isabel was Grace’s business, at least in Grace’s mind, and that was the view which prevailed.

Grace dipped the plate into the water and began to scrub at the recalcitrant fragments of food. “What will they do?” she asked. “Not that I’m being nosy.” She cast a glance at Isabel.

“But why do they want to be away from home for that long?”

Isabel folded up her copy of the newspaper. “Dallas in summer is not very pleasant,” she said. “It gets very warm. Baking, in fact. Think of Spain in summer, and then think hotter. Anybody who’s in a position to escape the heat does so.”

She rose from the table. She would usually spend the first half-hour of the morning after Grace’s arrival immersed in the crossword, but today she felt disinclined to follow that routine.

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She felt uneasy about something, and she thought that she might have been unsettled by the news of Cat’s new boyfriend.

Nieces found new boyfriends every day—there was nothing unusual in that; nor was there anything uncommon in the dismissal of one boyfriend in favour of another. From what Eddie had said, Patrick might be an improvement on Cat’s previous boyfriends, and yet, she thought, there is something that makes me feel uneasy; I am not mistaken about this.

She left Grace in the kitchen and went out into the hall.

From behind her she heard Grace switch on the radio, as she often did when engaged in housework. It was a studio discussion, a regular programme in which four or five people were invited to debate issues of the time. They were well-known voices—people who could be counted on to give a view on most things—and Isabel found it irritating. Grace did too, on this occasion, and Isabel heard the radio switched off quickly. She smiled. This was Grace’s reaction to a well-known politician whose voice, she confessed, she could not bear. “I know he can’t help it,” she had said once. “I know it’s not his fault, but I just can’t tolerate the sound of him. And I disagree with everything he says. Everything.”

Isabel moved through to her study, closing the door behind her. The morning’s mail had brought the usual selection of unsolicited manuscripts for the Review of Applied Ethics, which Isabel edited, but it had also brought the proofs of the next issue. The Review had taken to devoting every other issue to a single theme, and the topic for this issue was character and its implications for moral involvement in the world. She extracted the proofs from the padded envelope in which the printer had consigned them. This was always an important moment for her, when she saw the results of her work in printed form. And 2 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the editorial, which she often wrote at the last moment, would be there, in cold print, her own words invested with all the authority that printer’s ink on the page can impart.

She looked at the editorial. It was a curious thing, but she sometimes found it difficult to believe that she had written these editorials, with their carefully balanced appraisal of the arguments that her authors marshalled in their papers. Was this really her, this deliberative, even-handed person who signed the editorial at the bottom Isabel Dalhousie, Editor? She wondered for a moment whether others felt this. Did artists sometimes look at their work and wonder how they did it?

Character, she had written, is a term that almost requires explanation today. It means little to the psychologist, who talks about personality, but to the philosopher it is more than that. You may not be able to create a personality, but you can create a character for yourself.

Had she said that? She had written it almost three months ago and the prose had a somewhat distant feel to it, rather like an old letter filed away. It worried her that she had been too enthusiastic about the possibility of creating character. If character and personality were the same thing, then somebody was wrong: either the psychologists for saying that personality was immutable, or the philosophers for saying that it was malleable.

She was not sure, though, that psychologists said that personality was immutable: some did, perhaps, but others said that personality was just a collection of traits, some of which would be consistent across time and some of which would not.

Isabel had discussed this once before with her friend Richard Latcham, who was a psychiatrist. She had met Richard when she was in Cambridge and they had stayed in touch. A few months ago she had gone to a reunion in Cambridge and he T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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had invited her out to Papworth St. Agnes, where he lived. He had shown her his cars in what he called his motor house, a pagoda-style garage in the grounds of the sixteenth-century manor house. While looking at an old Bristol hard-top that he was restoring, the conversation had got on to effort and to how one might become good at the restoration of cars.

“Even you, Isabel,” Richard had said. “Even you could do this.”

She laughed. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

He said, “You’d learn. I’m not suggesting that you wouldn’t need to learn. But you could make yourself into a mechanic if you wanted to. What are you now? You’re a philosopher, aren’t you? But we can all become something different, can’t we?”

She had looked at the car. On the wall, pinned up, was a photograph of the car before he had started his restoration work. The transformation seemed to bear out what he had said.

But we can’t, she thought. We can’t all become something different. We may try to reinvent ourselves, but we are the same people underneath, incorrigibly so. She had turned to Richard and said as much, and he had reached out as she was speaking and removed a small mark from the bodywork of the fine old car.

“Bats,” he said. “No, that’s not what I think of your view. It’s just the occasional bat gets in here and makes a mess of the cars.”

Isabel thought for a moment. And then she said, “We don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.”

Richard looked at her in surprise, and she laughed. “Sorry,”

she said. “It’s just that somebody once wrote a paper called

‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ A professor of philosophy called Thomas Nagel.”

“And did Professor Nagel reach any conclusion?”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“That we don’t know. We can imagine. But we don’t know.”

And then Richard had said, “Of course, when I said that you could change, I should have said that there are some things you can’t change entirely. Your personality, for example, is something that is always there. Certainly after about the age of thirty.”

This had interested Isabel, because she thought that she had changed. The woman who had married John Liamor all those years ago, the young woman in Cambridge, her head turned by the cynical Irish historian with his unkempt good looks and his witty disparagements of what he called “the creaky gerontocracy” (by which he meant the University of Cambridge) and the “queerocracy” (by which he meant the Fellows of his College). That would be called homophobia now, but not then, when straight Irishmen could present themselves as victims, too, whose prejudices were beyond censure.

She had changed, because now she would see through John Liamor; and she had changed in other respects too. She had become more forgiving, more understanding of human weak-nesses than she had been in her twenties. And love, too, had become more important to her; not love in the erotic sense, which obeyed its own tides throughout life and could be as intense, as unreasonable in its demands, whatever age one was, but love in the sense of agape, the brotherly love of others, which was a subtle presence that became stronger as the years passed; that, at least, was what had happened with her.

“So there’s not much that we can do about that central bit of ourselves—the core?” she had asked. “Would you call it that—

the core?”

“A good enough name for it,” said Richard. “No, I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. The very deep bits of us, the real preferences, are there whether we like it or not. But T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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if these deep bits are not very pleasant we can keep them under control. We can adapt to them.” He laid a hand on the polished bonnet of the old car, gently, with fondness, as on a precious object. “And I suppose we can develop positive attitudes which mean that in our dealings with others, in our day-to-day lives, we behave a bit better.”

“And we would deserve credit for all the effort involved?”

Richard gave Isabel the answer she herself would have given. “Yes. A lot of credit.” He paused. “I had a patient once who had a problem.” He smiled. “Well, all my patients have a problem, I suppose, but this one had a particularly difficult problem. He was a liar. He just felt compelled to tell lies—

about all sorts of things. And he knew that it was wrong, and he had to fight with it every day. Life for him was one constant effort, but he managed to stop lying. And, do you know, I really admired that man. I really did.”

He was right, she thought. It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

That was where credit was deserved.

Richard gestured that they should leave the motor house.

He wanted to show Isabel the dovecote, with its small, carefully wrought bricks, an eighteenth-century addition.

“That man, the liar, really liked monopole Burgundy,” he said as they walked out into the open air. “I remember that, for some reason. Monopole Burgundy from a single vineyard.” He looked at Isabel and smiled. “Or that’s what he told me.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” she said. And immediately she regretted saying this, because it made light of that man’s effort. So she quickly said that she was sure that he liked it.

Richard was uncertain. “He might have liked it,” he said.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h S H E WO R K E D O N T H E P R OO F S , her study door closed behind her. Grace seemed to be busy upstairs, as Isabel heard her foot-fall through the ceiling. Something was dropped at one point, and fell with a thud, which was followed by a silence. Isabel looked up at the ceiling, and waited until the footsteps continued so she knew that Grace was not lying unconscious under some piece of furniture. Grace shifted things, which were never in quite the right place for her. Wardrobes would inch across a room; chests of drawers cross the carpet; occasional tables disappear into corners. Isabel thought that it might be something to do with the principles of feng shui. Grace had an interest in these things, although she was reluctant to talk about them, fearing Isabel’s scepticism. “There are some things we can’t prove,” she had once said to Isabel. “But we know that they work. We just know it.” And this had been followed by a challenging look, which left Isabel feeling unable to defend the position of empiricism.

By lunchtime she had read and corrected almost half of the issue. Several of the authors’ footnotes had been mangled in the setting, with page numbers disappearing or inflating impossibly and requiring to be deflated. Page 1027 could not exist; page 127 could, or page 102 or 107. This involved bibliographic checking, which took time, and sometimes required getting back in touch with the author. That meant e-mails to people who might not answer them quickly, or at all. And that gave rise to the thought that an article on the ethics of e-mail would perhaps be a good idea. Do you have to answer every e-mail that you get? Is ignoring an electronic message as rude as looking straight through somebody who addresses a remark to you? And T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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what, she wondered, was a reasonable delay between getting a message and responding to it? One of her authors had sent her an enquiry only two hours after sending an initial e-mail. Did you get my message? Can you give me a response? That, thought Isabel, could be the beginning of a new tyranny. Advances in technology were greeted with great enthusiasm and applause; then the tyranny emerged. Look at cars. They destroyed cities and communities. They laid waste to the land. Our worship at their altar choked us of our very air, constrained us to narrow paths beside their great avenues, cut us down. And yet . . . she thought of her green Swedish car, which she loved to drive on the open roads, which could take her from Edinburgh to the west coast, to Mull, to the Isle of Skye even, in four or five hours, just an afternoon. The same trip had taken the choleric Dr. Johnson weeks, and had been the cause of great discomfort and complaint. It was an exciting tyranny, then, one which we liked.

She went through to the kitchen to fetch herself a sandwich and a bowl of soup for lunch. Grace had made the soup, as she often did, and it was simmering on the stove, a broth of leek and potato, salted rather too heavily for Isabel’s taste, but good nonetheless. It was while Isabel was helping herself to this that Cat telephoned. There was often no particular reason for a telephone call from Cat, who liked to chat at idle moments, and this was such a call. Had Isabel seen that new Australian film at Film House? She should go, because it was excellent, better than anything else that Cat had seen that year. The Australians made such good films, didn’t they? So perceptive. And witty too.

Had Isabel seen . . .

Isabel sat down at the kitchen table, her soup before her, and continued to listen while Cat expounded on the merits of 3 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Australian cinema. Then, as Cat drew a breath, she asked, “Did you go that film with Patrick?”

“Yes,” said Cat. “I did. He was working late and so we met at the—” She stopped. “You haven’t met Patrick, have you? Did I tell you about him?”

Isabel thought quickly. She did not want to tell Cat that she had heard about Patrick from Eddie, because it might embarrass Eddie if Cat were to know that he discussed her affairs. She might not mind, of course, but one never knew with Cat.

“I can’t remember,” she said, which was not true. And she thought: Why should I feel inclined to lie in a matter as petty as this? So she said, “Actually, I was speaking to Eddie and I asked where you were. He mentioned Patrick.”

Cat was silent.

“It would be nice to meet him,” Isabel went on. She tried to sound unconcerned, as if meeting Patrick was not all that important. “You could bring him round, perhaps.”

“All right,” said Cat. “Whenever you like.”

After that the conversation trailed off. No date was chosen for Cat to bring Patrick to meet Isabel, but Isabel made a mental note to herself to call Cat the following day and suggest an evening. She did not want to press her, as she was meant not to be too interested in something which was none of her business.

She thought of Richard Latcham’s lying patient and his struggle to tell the truth. This was not a great moral battle that she faced, the battle not to get involved in matters that did not concern her; it was really quite a small one. But it was nonetheless her battle; unless, of course, one took the view that it was entirely natural to be interested in her niece’s boyfriends.

Grace came into the room. “Was that Cat?” she asked.

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Isabel took out a bowl and began to help Grace to soup. “It was,” she answered.

Grace opened a cupboard to put away a duster she had been carrying. “I met her new boyfriend,” she said casually. “I was passing by the deli and I popped in. He was there.”

Isabel looked down at her soup. “And?”

“He’s called Patrick,” she said. “And he seemed all right.”

“Oh,” said Isabel. “Well, that’s something.”

“Apparently Jamie knows him too,” Grace volunteered.

“They were at school together. Same age. Twenty-eight.”

This was unexpected information, so Isabel again said,

“Oh,” and continued with her soup. That gave her something to think about, and she did so, while Grace continued to talk about something that had happened at her spiritualist meeting the previous evening. The medium—somebody new, said Grace, somebody from Inverness (and they’re all a bit fey up there, she added)—had contacted the cousin of a young man who had been coming to the meetings for weeks but who had never said a word until then.

“At the end of the meeting he had changed completely,”

said Grace. “He said that he had blamed himself in some way for his cousin’s death and now the cousin had reassured him that it was all right.”

Isabel half listened. To be forgiven from beyond the grave could be important if that was the only quarter from which forgiveness could come, which, for many of us, she reflected, might well be the case.

C H A P T E R T H R E E

E

THERE’S SOMETHING I don’t quite understand,” said Jamie.

“I hope you don’t mind my talking about it. But I just don’t see why you should be doing this.”

They were sitting in a small pâtisserie round the corner from St. Stephen Street. The early afternoon light filtered through a corner of the window, illuminating floating particles of dust in the air; there was a smell of freshly made coffee in the air, and vanilla from the pastries. On the table behind them the day’s newspapers were untidily folded, outraged headlines half obscured by creases in the paper: warns . . . resignation . . .

erupts in somalia . . .

Isabel leaned back in her chair. “It’s because it’s Grace,” she said. “I don’t want to sound like the on-duty philosopher, but, frankly, I have a moral obligation to her.” And Somalia? she thought. What about Somalia? There was a book somewhere in the house, a book that had belonged to her father, which bore the title A Tear for Somalia. Did we owe it our tears?

Jamie continued, “But buying a flat . . .” He trailed off. It was an expensive gift, it seemed to him, and although he knew T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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that Isabel was generous, this seemed to be generosity taken too far. “How much is it going to cost you? Two hundred thousand?”

Isabel looked away. She did not like talking about money, and in particular she did not like talking about actual figures. It could be more than two hundred thousand, but the funds were there and she thought that what she did with them was her own affair.

“It could cost that,” she said quietly.

“And that’s an awful lot of money,” said Jamie. “A quarter of a million pounds. Just about.”

Isabel shrugged. “That’s what flats cost in this city,” she said.

“Why can’t Grace get a mortgage? Like everybody else?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question, and one which Isabel had asked herself. But the answer was that Grace was reluctant to take on debt and Isabel had given her word to her father that she would do what was necessary to look after her. In Isabel’s view, that meant that she needed to provide her with a roof over her head. And even if she had not made that promise, she would probably have done it anyway.

“Grace is not the sort of person who would like a mortgage,”

said Isabel.

Jamie frowned. “Well, all right. But why you? Why do you have to do it?”

Isabel looked quizzically at Jamie. “Are you trying to protect me?” she asked.

Jamie said nothing for a while, but then a smile broke out on his face. “I suppose I am,” he muttered. “You do some . . .

some odd things.” Then he added, “Sometimes.”

“Well, that’s very reassuring,” said Isabel. “I’m busy trying to do something for Grace. You’re busy trying to do something for 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h me. And Grace, in her own inimitable way, spends a lot of time trying to look after me and you too—to an extent. A nice illustration of what moral community is all about.”

The flat she was to look at that day was halfway along St.

Stephen Street, a street of second-hand shops and bars; a street which prided itself on its slightly bohemian character yet was too expensive for students who might fancy living in such a quarter. People who lived there had to tolerate a certain amount of noise from the bars and the restaurants, but enjoyed, in return, the convenience of the coffee shops and bakeries round the corner, and the sheer beauty of the architecture, which was classical Georgian. Isabel was not sure about it as an address for Grace, who might be hoping for something more conventional, but thought that she would take a look at it, in case it proved to be suitable. The price was about right, and she had been told that she might even be able to lower it if she found cause to shake her head and complain about something.

She had asked Jamie to look at the flat with her because she thought that his local knowledge might help. Jamie lived in Saxe-Coburg Street, which was only a couple of blocks away to the north, and he often walked along St. Stephen Street on his way into town. He had known some people who lived there, he said, and they had talked to him about the locality, although he was having difficulty remembering what they had said. “I think they liked it,” he said. “Or did they say they didn’t? Sorry, I just can’t remember.”

That had not been very helpful, and it had reminded Isabel, inconsequentially, of Wittgenstein’s account of his last meeting with Gottlob Frege. “The last time I saw Frege,” he said, “as we were waiting at the station for my train, I said to him, ‘Don’t you ever find any difficulty in your theory that numbers are objects?’

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He replied, ‘Sometimes I seem to see a difficulty—but then again I don’t see it.’ ” Isabel was not sure whether this was funny. She thought it might be, but stories told by philosophers which appeared to be funny were sometimes not funny at all, but very serious. And sometimes very serious remarks made by philosophers were, in fact, jokes, and intended to be taken as such.

Jamie had arrived at the café first that morning, and she found him already seated at the table near the window, paging through a musical score. He rose to greet her—Jamie always stood for women—and he reached out to shake her hand. They did not exchange a kiss of greeting; they had never done this, although it had become the social norm in some circles in Edinburgh. Friends, even friends of a single meeting’s standing, kissed one another when they met; or at least men and women did. Isabel was unhappy about this rash of kissing. A kiss, she thought, was an intimate gesture, which was not enjoyable in any way when you did not know the person very well. Indeed it could be embarrassing: spectacles could get in the way and lipstick be left on male cheeks. There were other arguments against it: the recent consumption of garlic had a tendency to make an impression, and it was, she assumed, a good way of passing on a cold.

She would have enjoyed kissing Jamie, though—even through a miasma of garlic. He is so beautiful, she thought. He is at the moment of his greatest beauty, round about now. He will never be so beautiful again.

“You look thoughtful,” said Jamie as they sat down together.

Isabel blushed. She could hardly say to him: I was thinking of what it would be like to kiss you. We often cannot tell people just what is going on in our minds, she thought, and so we hide 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h things. And that was inevitable—to a degree—although there was a danger, surely, that if one concealed too much it would show. One would become furtive.

“I was thinking, I suppose,” she said lightly. “I find I think too much. You yourself have accused me of that, haven’t you?”

He had. He had told her on several occasions that she complicated matters and that the world was simpler than she imagined. But she had paid no attention, or, if she had heeded his advice, she had been unable to change her ways.

Jamie smiled. “Yes. I’ve told you plenty of times. Don’t make things difficult for yourself. And do you do anything about it?

You don’t.”

Isabel knew that he was right about her. But what he said raised the broader issue of whether anybody ever listened to advice. She suspected that few did.

“And do you listen to my advice?” she retorted.

Jamie looked puzzled. “What advice have you ever given me?”

Isabel was already asking herself this even as he posed the question. The only advice she had given him had to do with Cat.

She had told him to give up any thought of getting Cat back because there was just no prospect of it ever happening.

She looked at Jamie, and he knew immediately what she was going to say. He looked down at the table in his embarrassment. “I know,” he said. She waited for him to say something more, but he was silent.

She felt sorry for him. People made bad choices when it came to other people; and some people never recovered from the mistakes they made. Everybody knew just how sad it was to have a hopeless love, but still people, including herself, fell for the unattainable. There is no point in my loving this young man, she told herself, because it can never go anywhere. And yet did T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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it matter if love was not reciprocated? Was it not possible to love somebody hopelessly, from a distance even, and for that love to be satisfying, even if never reciprocated, even if the object of one’s affections never even knew? Jamie could love Cat even if he never, or only rarely, saw her. And she could love Jamie even if he never knew that she did. Both of us give love, she thought, and that must do something for us. Perhaps it was a bit like giving an anonymous gift. If one derived pleasure from the giving of something even if the recipient never knows who gave it—

and it was a pleasure to give anonymously, as Isabel knew—then could not the giving of love be satisfying even if the person one loved never knew that he or she was loved? People did that all the time when they loved the inaccessible: the great romantic heroes, the film stars, the rock musicians, who were loved by legions of people who never saw them. Or the saints, and, if one came to think about it, God—although he, if one believed in him, loved one back, and so that was different; that was reciprocated love.

“Does it matter?” she asked Jamie. “Does it matter if one loves somebody who doesn’t love one back? Do you think that it makes a difference?”

He looked up at her. “Of course it does. It’s sad.”

“Sad?” she mused.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s like . . .”

She raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Like talking to somebody who isn’t listening,” Jamie said.

“Yes, that’s what it’s like.”

Isabel thought about that for a moment. “Is it because one can’t share the feeling of love? Is it like having dinner all by oneself?”

It was then that Jamie had asked her about why she was 4 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h buying Grace the flat, and the conversation had drifted off unsatisfactorily into theories of moral obligation. After a few minutes of that, Jamie signalled to the waitress. “We’re going to have to hurry,” he said to Isabel, tapping his watch. “Isn’t this person expecting you in the flat in ten minutes?”

Isabel replied that she was. So they placed their order for coffee and moved off the subject of morality, which was intrac-table, to house prices, which was a depressing subject. Both of them owned their houses; Jamie by virtue of the generosity of an elderly relative eager to avoid inheritance tax, and Isabel because her father had left it to her: old money, or at least money in late adolescence. Neither had earned the place in which they lived; many of those who earned what they had could hardly afford to live in Edinburgh now, with its high prices, just as people in London and New York found salaries inadequate for the cost of buying a roof to go over one’s head. There was something wrong with this, Isabel thought, but it seemed to be an inescapable aspect of economic life: those who came in latest had the most uncomfortable chair, or no chair at all.

T H E R E WA S N O T I M E for further conversation. They gulped their coffee down and then walked round the corner into St.

Stephen Street.

“Here we are,” said Isabel, pointing to a door at the top of a short flight of external stone steps. “That’s the number.”

Outside the door, mounted on a shabby brass plaque, were the names of the residents. Isabel found the name she was looking for, Macreadie, and rang the bell.

“Just walk right up,” issued a woman’s voice from a small intercom. “Top floor.”

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The mutual stairway was shabby and smelled of cat. And there, on the second-floor landing, was the possible culprit, a large tom in ginger, with ears tattered by conflict and a wall eye.

“A pugilist,” said Isabel, pointing to the cat.

“Somebody loves him,” said Jamie. “But let’s not go into that again.”

They reached the top landing and found that the door had already been opened for them. Standing in the doorway was a woman of about sixty, her hair swept back in the way used by Grace, wearing an intricately knitted Shetland sweater. Isabel noticed the pattern immediately. Somebody had sat for hours over that, working in all the natural colours, putting the sky and sea of those beautiful bare islands into the design.

Isabel introduced herself. “I’m Isabel Dalhousie. We spoke on the phone.”

The woman smiled at her and then she looked at Jamie.

“My friend, Jamie,” Isabel said. She saw the woman’s eyes move to Jamie and then come back to her quickly. Something had crossed the woman’s mind—and it occurred to Isabel that she was wondering what the relationship was. She had experienced this before—in restaurants, in cafés—when people had let their curiosity become apparent, or masked it too slowly.

They entered the flat, following the woman into the hall.

Being on the top floor, the flat had an old-fashioned skylight, a small cupola, set into the roof, and this gave the hall an airy feeling.

“Falling light,” said Isabel. “Very nice, Mrs. . . .”

“Macreadie,” said the woman. “Or Florence, if you like.”

They left the hall and went into the kitchen. It was old-fashioned and a bit cramped, but there were useful cupboards built up against one wall and a well-used stone surface round 4 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the deep-set sink. Jamie went to the window and peered out, down into the drying green below, a small square of communally owned grass.

“I used to sit out there in the summer,” said Florence. “In the days when we had a summer. A long time ago.”

“Global cooling,” said Isabel. “Everybody else gets warmer while Scotland gets colder.”

“That’s not true,” Jamie corrected her.

They left the kitchen and went into the living room. This was also not particularly large, and Isabel thought that there was too much clutter. She tried to imagine the room without the glass-fronted display cabinet with all its trinkets, without the table covered with framed family photographs, without the ungainly Canterbury stuffed with magazines.

“This looks out onto St. Stephen Street,” said Florence.

“There’s a pub opposite, isn’t there?” asked Jamie.

Florence nodded. “It can be a touch noisy on Friday and Saturday,” she said. “But the bedroom is round the back. That looks out over the green. That’s as quiet as the grave.”

“Of course it will be,” said Isabel. She liked the feel of the flat and she liked the owner. She had decided that Florence was a retired schoolteacher; she had that look about her and the bookshelves, she had noted, were those of an intelligent reader.

But what had decided it was the presence on a shelf of A History of Scottish Education.

As they walked back through the hall to inspect the bedroom, Isabel asked Florence whether she was leaving Edinburgh altogether. When buying a house it was useful to know what the sellers were doing: a sudden departure or a sideways move was a danger signal.

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“I was left a house in Trinity,” Florence explained. “I have been very fortunate. It was my aunt’s place.”

That, thought Isabel, settles that; at least it ruled out the sudden arrival of an impossible neighbour. But what about the cat? Could somebody else’s incontinent cat prompt a move?

“We saw a cat,” she said. “On the stairs . . .”

“That’s Basil,” said Florence. “He belongs downstairs. I’m very fond of him. He comes in here for a visit from time to time.”

“And the neighbours?” asked Isabel.

Florence reached out and touched Isabel on the arm. “I’d tell you,” she said. “I really would tell you if they were a problem. They’re angels, actually. All of them.”

Isabel felt embarrassed that her questions had been so transparent. Yet the way in which she had been gently reproached made Florence appeal all the more to her. She felt that there was a current of fellow feeling emanating from this woman to her. It was reassuring—and touching, though she wondered what lay behind it. There were occasions—and they were quite common—when two people met and instantly got along together; something happened, possibly at a subconscious level, some sensing of sympathetic chemicals, which led to a rapport. Grace, who believed in telepathy, would say it was that.

“I can tell what people are thinking,” she said. “I really can.”

And Isabel had said, “Oh yes, well, tell me what I’m thinking then.”

“You’re thinking that I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” said Grace. And in that she was right.

Jamie did not follow them into the bedroom, but returned to the kitchen, to peer again out the window. Florence pointed 4 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out the cupboards, the old fireplace in which stood an arrangement of dried flowers and which, she said, could be opened up again if one wanted an open fire. “So many flats had their fireplaces taken out,” she said. “Beautiful old Victorian fireplaces.

Georgian too. Such a loss.”

Isabel looked at the dried flowers, dusty and pale, washed of colour. “Such a tucked-away bedroom,” she said. “So snug.”

Florence gave her a conspiratorial look. “Yes. I can see you in this place, you know. You and your friend.” She looked through the open door in the direction of the kitchen.

For a moment Isabel said nothing. She felt embarrassed by the misunderstanding, but she also felt flattered that Florence should imagine that she and Jamie were together in that sense.

Yes, she thought, it would be good to be living here with him, living together as lovers. But she could not let Florence continue to believe something that was false, and so she started to explain. “Jamie and I—” she began. But she did not continue, as Jamie had appeared in the doorway.

“The bedroom,” said Isabel, letting him look past her. “Isn’t it nice?”

Jamie nodded his approval. Again he went to the window and looked out, poking at the wooden frame as he did so. He had told Isabel about rotten window sills in New Town flats and the importance of knowing just what repairs one was letting oneself in for. This wood appeared to be solid, though, and he turned to face into the room. Florence was staring at him, a smile about her lips.

Isabel could not say anything about Jamie now, could not give the explanation that was needed, and so she looked at her watch and then at Jamie. “We should be getting along,” she said.

“We have to . . .” She left that unfinished. They did not have to T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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do anything, but she felt that she had seen enough of the flat and she wanted to be out in the street. She would offer for it, she thought. She would talk to Simon Mackintosh, her lawyer, and make an offer.

They said goodbye to Florence, who saw them off in the hall. Then, on the stairway, on the way down, Jamie turned to her and said, “As nice as it gets around here.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Top floor, which will make a difference to the noise.

Bedroom at the back. Well maintained. And the wiring’s new. I had a quick look.”

Isabel smiled at him. “I knew that it was a good idea to bring you.”

They went out onto the street, closing the heavy, blue-painted communal door behind them. A young couple walked past them, going in the direction of Royal Circus, the woman’s midriff was exposed, the mottled white flesh shaking as she moved, and the man’s jeans were fashionably torn, affording a view from the rear of dark-blue undershorts. Display of the body, thought Isabel; changing conceptions of the private. It was no longer socially impermissible for men to show their undershorts, and perhaps that was not unreasonable. Was there anything inherently more private about one garment rather than another?

Jamie was going to Castle Street, and Isabel, who was returning home, had planned to go in that direction, so they walked together up Gloucester Lane towards the end of Heriot Row. Gloucester Lane was a narrow cobbled alleyway on both sides of which were mews houses. Jamie pointed out how much more expensive these were, although sometimes they were smaller than the flat they had just looked over.

4 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“It’s strange how much people will pay for an address,” he said. “Don’t you think that rather odd?”

“Not at all,” said Isabel. “Jockeying for social position is what people do. Instinctively. We’re competitive creatures.”

He looked up at a window in which a black-and-white cat was seated, eyeing them disdainfully. “You’re a bit of a snob, Isabel.”

He had not intended to say it; it had just come out. And now it was uttered, and he regretted it, as he sensed Isabel bristle beside him.

She stopped and turned to him. “I most certainly am not,”

she said. “That’s most unfair. It really is.”

He reached out and took her arm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that seriously. You’re not a snob. You’re not.”

Isabel brushed his hand away. “All I said was that people do tend to go for what they think of as socially prestigious. And they do. Everywhere, in every society you care to mention.

That’s just a factual observation. A snob would say that it mattered where you came from, what your address was, and so on. I don’t say that for a moment. Not one moment.”

Jamie knew that she was right, and that his comment had been wrong and hurtful. Poor Isabel. She tried so hard to do the right thing—she agonised over these things all the time—and he had gone and accused her of something really nasty, which she did not deserve.

She had started to walk off without him, and he ran to catch up with her. “That was a stupid remark I made,” he said. “Really stupid. Will you forgive me?”

Her voice was cold. “Think nothing of it.”

“I meant— really forgive me,” he said.

She was silent, and so Jamie persisted. “You know, you often T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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go on about forgiveness. Yes, I’ve heard you. And yet do you practise it yourself?”

She looked at him. “So now you’re accusing me of hypocrisy as well as snobbery? Is that it?”

“Oh, Isabel, for God’s sake . . .”

She closed her eyes. He was right in what he said about forgiveness; it was just that she was vulnerable to insensitive words from him—not that his words had been particularly insensitive—and this vulnerability was all the greater because she could not talk to him about it. To him she was just another friend, nothing more, and one could talk like that to a mere friend. And that, she thought, is my personal tragedy. As long as I am afraid to tell him of my love, to confess it to him, then I shall have to pretend that we are just friends on this level. But I cannot tell him. That would end even the friendship. He would be appalled. He would run away.

“We’re arguing over nothing,” she said. “Of course I know you didn’t mean it. Sorry.”

They resumed their walk up the hill. At the top of Gloucester Lane, the mews houses gave way to broader, more elegant streets, to Heriot Row and Darnaway Street. Heriot Row, which faced south, was a long sweep of Georgian terrace, with formal gardens on the other side. It was a street and an attitude rolled into one; most of those who lived here played the part expected of them and furnished their houses and flats with Georgian furniture. The high windows of the drawing-room floors were draped with long-drop curtains, bunched at the sides, secured with formal tassels; the windows at street level afforded a glimpse of dining rooms with rise-and-fall lights above large mahogany tables, of grand pianos, of book-lined studies. It was a world which Isabel understood, and in which she could move, and yet 4 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h it was not the world in which she chose to live. There was a deadness of the soul in such places, she thought; it was like being in a museum, living a life devoid of colour and spontaneity.

“Heriot Row has always given me the creeps,” she said.

Jamie looked up at the windows. “I don’t know,” he said. “I went to a party here once. I didn’t get the creeps. In fact, it was rather fun.”

“It’s too perfect,” she said. “I suppose most cities have places which are just too perfect. There’s Mayfair in London. All very clean and well looked after. But sterile too. And there are those streets in the smart parts of New York. The ones with those unwelcoming doormen. Too rarefied for me.”

She was about to say something about Paris, too, when something caught her eye. She and Jamie were about to cross the road when a car swung down from Wemyss Place and turned right into Heriot Row.

“That’s a beauty of a car,” Jamie said. “Look at it.”

Isabel was uninterested in cars, but interested in those within. And in this case she recognised them, the man and the woman from the gallery. He was at the wheel, occupied with driving, but the woman turned and looked at Isabel and Jamie as the car went past. She looked at Isabel for only a moment, a look which gave no sign of recognition; then her eyes moved to Jamie, and for a brief second she stared at him before the car moved beyond them and made its way down Heriot Row.

“That woman looked at you,” said Isabel. “Did you see?”

“What a stunner,” said Jamie.

“Not close up,” said Isabel. “I met her in the Scottish Gallery.”

“I was talking about her car,” said Jamie.

A few minutes later they parted company. Jamie had to visit T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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an insurance office in Castle Street and so they said goodbye at the corner of Hill Street. Then Isabel continued her walk home, thinking, as she did, of the coincidence of seeing the American visitors twice in so short a time. What were they doing? Who were they? She was barely any further along the road to knowing anything about that than she had been when she first saw them from the window of Glass and Thompson. But why that should be of the slightest importance, she had no idea. She meant nothing to them, and they should mean nothing to her. And yet they did.

C H A P T E R F O U R

E

MY DEAR,” said Mimi McKnight, “just look at us! Bedrag-gled! In need of . . . well, in need of everything, I suspect.

Hydration, certainly.”

Isabel had offered to fetch Joe and Mimi from the airport, but had been firmly turned down. They would find a taxi, they said, and arrive under their own steam, which they did, laden with several months’ worth of luggage and gifts for Isabel and the various others with whom they would be staying on their trip. Isabel received two large bottles of Tabasco sauce, a copy of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems and a nineteenth-century Mexican miniature silver candelabra.

Mimi was first cousin to Isabel’s mother, Hibby. Mimi was from Dallas, but Hibby had been born and raised in Mobile, on the Alabama coast, a city of elegant oaks and long stories of the blood. Mobile was a proud place, and did not care for the ignorant condescension of outsiders. “We invented Mardi Gras,”

Isabel had been told by her mother. “New Orleans thinks it did, but it’s wrong. We did. That’s your heritage, Isabel.” But there was another side to the heritage of well-to-do Mobile, of course: the dark side of the South—and this was not talked about, or T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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used not to be. It was there, though, and could be seen in the musty family photograph albums, where the servants stood in the background, under a tree, beside the cars, carrying things.

That’s what can lie behind money, thought Isabel; not always, but often: expropriated lives; the lives of people in the background, nameless, forgotten, who never really owned very much.

As a teenager Isabel’s mother had been sent to Dallas in the summer, away from the humidity of the Gulf Coast and into dry heat of the Texas plains, thought to be better for you and more tolerable. There she stayed with her cousin, Mimi, and did the things which teenagers of the time and place did: shopping at Neiman Marcus on Commerce Street, swimming at the club, waiting for something to happen, which it never did.

Then their paths had diverged. Hibby had gone to New York, to the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School, and had then worked for two years with a firm of Wall Street lawyers. Several of these lawyers would have been quite happy to marry her; she was good-looking and had that Southern charm that young men found irresistible. But she, in turn, found the attractions of a Scottish graduate student at Columbia Law School equally irresistible, and married Isabel’s father instead. Back in Mobile, they put a brave face on this, and those relatives who had met her intended husband reported positively. It was not the end of the world. Mimi, in particular, who had met Isabel’s father at the engagement party that Hibby held in New York, could not understand their misgivings. “Everything about him is perfect,”

she said. “Even his imperfections.”

Mimi’s marriage to Joe McKnight was a second marriage for both of them. Joe, a professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was an authority on Texas legal history and the law of the Spanish colonies, of which Texas had been one.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Had been, Joe stressed. “We stole it from the Mexicans fair and square,” he pointed out, half seriously.

His interests were antiquarian, and these were shared by Mimi, who dealt in rare books. Joe restored and rebound these books in the small bindery that he had set up in an upstairs room in their Dallas house, a room stacked with pots of glue, bolts of soft binding leather, all the tools of that trade. He knew all about these leathers and endpapers and bookworms. And Mimi knew all about choral music and old cookery books and cats.

They arrived in the early evening. Isabel had shown them to their room, the guest room at the back of the house, which, although it got little direct sunlight, had a view over the garden.

“The room we were in last time,” said Mimi. “And there’s that painting.” She crossed the room to look at the large oil hung on the wall above the chest of drawers. A man and his wife, their arms around two young children, huddled together on the deck of a sailing ship. Behind them the waves were swelling, whipped to white at the crests, almost obscuring the shores of a distant island. “That’s Skye, isn’t it?” she asked.

Isabel nodded. “McTaggart,” she said. “And yes, I think that it is Skye. He painted quite a few pictures like that. People leaving Scotland, setting off for their new lives in Nova Scotia or Boston, or wherever it was.”

Mimi stood before the large picture, which she gazed at through her large oval glasses. “And off they went,” she said.

“Look at the children’s expressions. Look at them.”

Isabel joined Mimi in front of the painting. She was not particularly fond of McTaggart, and this explained the painting’s presence in the guest bedroom, where she rarely saw it. It had been a favourite of her father’s, though; he liked nineteenth-T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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century Romantic painters and had bought this cheaply at an auction, one of the first paintings he acquired, and had given it to Isabel’s mother. Isabel suspected that her mother had not liked it either, but had never said as much.

The children in the painting seemed impervious to their fate. The parents saw before them only a hazardous sea voy-age, weeks of seasickness and privation, and, at the end of it all, a landing in a hard and unknown country. For the children, though, setting sail was a great adventure. The boy, his face bright with excitement, was pointing at a seagull that was riding the boat’s slipstream; the girl was saying something to a doll she was clutching—some maternal words of encouragement, a lul-laby perhaps.

“It makes me think of ‘Lochaber No More,’ ” said Isabel.

“Do you know that song, Mimi? It’s about leaving Scotland.

About never again seeing the place you’ve loved.”

Mimi, lost in the painting, said nothing.

Isabel recited:

“Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my Jean, Where heartsome wi’ her I ha’e mony day been, For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more, We’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.”

Mimi turned to Isabel. “But that’s very beautiful,” she said.

“Sad. Sad and beautiful. To be heartsome with somebody. What a lovely word.”

Isabel smiled. “That’s what this country’s like, you know. It has a way of surprising you. It’s hard to be indifferent to it.” She turned away from the McTaggart. “But I have things to do. We’re having company for dinner.”

She was aware as she spoke that she had unconsciously 5 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h slipped into an American idiom. People in Edinburgh did not have company in the way in which they did in America. They had guests.

“Guests?” asked Mimi.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Cat.”

“Good,” said Mimi. “I have a gift for her. And Joe has always had a soft spot for Cat, haven’t you, Joe?”

“Yes,” said Joe. “Nice girl.”

“And she has a new boyfriend, Patrick,” said Isabel. “He’s coming with her.”

Mimi and Isabel exchanged glances. Mimi had heard of Toby, and of the others; or at least she had heard Isabel’s version.

“I’ve not met him yet,” Isabel admitted. “But preliminary reports . . .” She hesitated. There had been only one report so far, and that had come from Eddie. Was Eddie a good judge of these matters?

“Are favourable?” asked Mimi.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “But we shall shortly see. I hope you don’t mind, by the way, having something on your first evening. It occurred to me after I had arranged it that you might want a quiet evening.”

Mimi assured Isabel that she and Joe would be very happy to be entertained that night. “And I want to meet Patrick,”

she said. “Poor young man. Do you think he’ll mind being on display?”

“Nobody enjoys being on display,” said Isabel. But then she thought: Some do, and so she added, “Except actors. And narcissists.” Patrick could be both of these, she thought. She wondered whether a narcissistic actor would be an improvement on an unfaithful wine merchant, which is what Toby had been.

Motor insurance companies rated people according to occupa-T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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tion when they assessed risk; poets and journalists paid a higher premium than lawyers and librarians. It had not occurred to her before, but now she saw it: the risk a man posed to a woman probably ran in parallel to the insurance risk he represented.

Dangerous drivers made dangerous lovers. Safe, reliable personalities made safe reliable boyfriends and husbands. But how dull!

“You’re smiling at something,” said Mimi.

PAT R I C K , a glass of wine in his hand, was sitting on the sofa, talking to Mimi. Joe, standing near the fireplace, was engrossed in conversation with Cat. Isabel, who had left her guests for a few minutes to attend to something in the kitchen, took in the scene from the doorway. There had been no awkwardness when Cat and Patrick arrived; just the smallest of warning glances, perhaps, between Cat and Isabel. Cat knew that Isabel was making an effort not to involve herself in her affairs, and appreciated this, but old habits, she knew, died hard.

They had spoken to each other briefly in the kitchen, when Cat had come through to help. “He seems very nice,” Isabel had said. It was a trite word— nice—but it would have to do in the circumstances. And what else could she have said? She had yet to talk to Patrick and get to know him; nice was about as far as she could go at present.

“We get on very well,” said Cat quietly. “I thought that you’d like him.”

“He’s very good-looking,” said Isabel, smiling.

Cat, carefully placing canapés on a plate, looked at Isabel sharply.

“Well, he is,” said Isabel defensively. “I’m not accusing you 5 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of going for looks. But if the looks are there, then all the better.”

She was not sure if she believed what she said. Of course Cat went for looks. It had been apparent to Isabel ever since Cat had been sixteen and had produced her first boyfriend that she was attracted to tall young men with regular features and blond hair. It was a cliché of male beauty, really, and Cat subscribed to it enthusiastically. Of course there was a biological message in it, as there was in all messages of beauty. In choosing me, it said, you choose somebody who is strong and reliable and who will give you strong children. Ultimately everything that the poets said about love was a romanticization of the fundamental biological imperative: find somebody with whom to produce children and who will help you raise them.

She did not have the chance to speak at length to Patrick until they were seated at the table. Exercising her prerogative as hostess, she had placed Patrick on her right, which would enable her to find out what she needed to find out. He proved forthcoming. He was a lawyer, he revealed. He worked for a firm that specialised in takeovers, which he called acquisitions. “We acquire companies,” he said simply. “I draw up lists of things that have to be checked. We call it compliance.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow. There was something soft about him, she thought. In spite of the masculine good looks, the chiselled features, there was something yielding and feminine about him. And yet here he was talking about pouncing. For a moment, a ridiculous moment, she imagined Patrick pouncing on Cat, his long limbs poised like springs, his thin, elegant fingers extended like claws.

“Redness in tooth and claw,” she muttered.

“Money doesn’t stay in a hole,” said Patrick casually, dipping his spoon into his soup. “It needs to be active.”

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Isabel felt herself becoming irritated. Money was an inanimate force. It was people who were active, who made money do things. “But these takeovers involve people losing their jobs,”

she said. “Isn’t that true? From what I’ve heard, the first thing that the new owners do is try to get rid of as many people as they can.”

Patrick put down his spoon. “Sometimes,” he said. “But companies aren’t charities. People can’t expect a job for life. Not these days.”

Isabel told herself that she should try to like Patrick. She had promised herself that she would give him a chance, and that she would not make any assumptions. But what she now felt was not an assumption. This was a conclusion: Patrick was self-satisfied. He was as shallow as Toby had been; more intelligent, perhaps, but just as shallow.

“Are you going to be a lawyer for the rest of your career?”

she asked quietly.

Patrick looked surprised. He took a piece of bread roll from his plate and broke it. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I want to do.”

He spoke in a slightly pedantic way, the words carefully chosen and articulated, as if everything that he said was the result of careful deliberation.

“In that case,” said Isabel, “you yourself expect a job for life.

Interesting.” She waited a moment for her remark to sink in.

Patrick was not slow, and he gave a wry smile when he saw the trap he had stepped into.

“Being a lawyer is a career,” he said. “I don’t expect to be with the same firm all my life. The people I’m with at the moment could get rid of me tomorrow if they wanted.”

“But they won’t, will they?” said Isabel.

“Probably not. But they could, you know.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“If they were taken over?”

“Law firms tend not to get taken over,” said Patrick. And again he recognised the trap. The rules of the jungle did not apply to those who wrote the rules of the jungle.

“ W E L L ,” said Isabel to Mimi. “That’s Patrick.”

The two women were standing in the kitchen after dinner.

Cat and Patrick had left, and Joe, tired from the journey, had gone upstairs to bed. They had brought the plates and dishes through, and these were now stacked above the dishwasher, ready to be loaded.

“Yes, Patrick,” said Mimi neutrally.

Isabel knew that Mimi was charitable in her views. It was one of her great qualities: Mimi did not like to belittle others.

And, I must remind myself, Isabel thought, that I have had a single meeting with him. I am fourteen years older than he is.

Nobody is asking me to sit in judgement on him.

“He’s bright,” said Isabel. “Toby wasn’t.”

“No, so I hear,” said Mimi.

“And I can see what she sees in him physically,” said Isabel.

“He’s . . .”

“Yes,” said Mimi. “He certainly is.”

There was silence for a moment. “He lives with his mother,”

said Mimi. “When I was speaking to him through there, he told me. He says that he’s lived with his mother all along. Through law school, through his traineeship, and he’s still there.”

“That’s unusual,” said Isabel. “Or is it, these days? Children are going back home, I gather, but they usually go away first.”

She paused. She remembered Eddie’s remark: Patrick is more T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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like me. What exactly did that mean? Now that she had met Patrick she thought that she might understand it better.

“I found him a bit . . . ,” she began.

“A bit?” asked Mimi.

Isabel was not sure. “A bit something. But I’m not sure what it is. It’s a sort of fussiness, perhaps. Yes, fussiness might be the word. I can imagine that he likes to have everything neat and tidy. I imagine that he disapproves of a lot of things. That sort.”

“Do you think that he disapproved of us?” asked Mimi, picking up a heavy crystal glass and holding it up to the light.

“This was his glass, by the way.”

Isabel looked at the glass. There was nothing unusual about it. A few tiny grains of dark sediment from the red wine it had contained stuck to the bottom, just above the stem.

“Do you notice anything?” asked Mimi, handing the glass to Isabel.

She looked at it. There was nothing; just the grains. Were they significant? She looked at them again. “Just a bit of sediment,” she said, puzzled.

Mimi looked amused. “Look at the rim,” she said.

Isabel looked but could see nothing. Then she saw. Nothing was what she saw.

“Quite clean,” said Mimi. “He wiped it after he used it. I saw him do it. He wiped it with his table napkin.”

“An obsessive,” said Isabel.

“Maybe,” said Mimi. “But you know what I think? I think he’s a mama’s boy.” She paused and took the glass back from Isabel. “I just get that feeling about him. I hope that I’m not doing him an injustice, but he reminds me very strongly of somebody I knew in Dallas, somebody just like him. He lived with his 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h mother near the country club in Highland Park. In one of those large places on Beverly. She more or less wouldn’t let him out of her sight.”

Isabel remembered Beverly, with its ostentatious houses, mansions really, and their manicured lawns. And she imagined the mama’s boy on Beverly drinking iced tea under the revolving fan, watched by a Dallas matron, from her chair, vigilant. “And?”

she said.

“The mother saw off the poor boy’s girlfriends,” Mimi said.

“Saw them off. Every one of them.” It had been a matter of remark; people had laughed about it, although it was not a laughing matter, said Mimi. The mother had died, and for a time the son had remained where he was, in the same house, in thrall to the memory of the mother who was not there, stuck in the cautious rituals that she had instilled in him. Then he held a party, an immense blowout, and he went off with the party planner, a blonde from Fort Worth, who would have been the embodiment of his mother’s worst nightmare. “Not an intellectual,” observed Mimi. “The lady, that is.”

“So Cat . . .”

“May encounter a problem,” supplied Mimi. “Although we could be quite wrong, you know. Does that thought occur to you, Isabel? Do you think I could be quite wrong?”

That thought had occurred frequently. Isabel’s training as a philosopher would have been in vain had she not opened herself up to doubt. Doubt was a constant, a condition of her being. “Often,” said Isabel thoughtfully. Then she added, “But not now.”

They left it at that. Isabel felt uncomfortable talking about Patrick in this way. She reminded herself that she had resolved to make an effort to like him, and she would do that, for Cat’s T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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sake. It was really no business of hers if Cat should take up with a mama’s boy—or an obsessive, for that matter. Cat’s life was her own, and she, Isabel, would welcome whomsoever Cat chose to share her life with. Isabel would have wished that this had been Jamie, but it was not, and if it was going to be Patrick, then so be it. I shall make the most of him, thought Isabel. I really shall.

Patrick and I will become friends.

In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create the conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. Open then our hearts—these words came into her mind, dredged from somewhere in her memory, from some unknown context. If one opened one’s heart, then friendship, and love, too, might alight and make their presence known. It was the act of opening that came first; that was the important thing, the first thing. But who was it who said, Open then our hearts? Where did that come from?

C H A P T E R F I V E

E

MARMITE?” asked Isabel over breakfast.

“The National Library of Scotland,” said Joe, buttering a slice of toast. He applied only butter, scrupulously avoiding the open jar of Marmite which Isabel had placed in front of him.

She noticed the spurning of the Marmite. That, she said, was her test of acculturation. Only the most determined of anglophiles would eat Marmite, and not even all of those. For the rest, it was an inexplicable British taste, quite beyond sympathy. Drinking lukewarm beer and taking tea with lashings of milk were understandable, even to a Texan for whom iced tea was only natural; but to spread on one’s toast a salty black yeast paste was beyond comprehension. And Joe, who had been a Rhodes Scholar, and who liked nothing more than to spend the summer in a rambling house which they rented in Oxford, was an anglophile by any standard; but not by the measure of Marmite.

“Yes,” said Joe. “I intend to spend the day in the National Library of Scotland. And no thank you, I don’t like Marmite.”

“Working on your history of adoption?”

“Precisely. They have some very interesting material there.”

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Mimi reached for the coffee pot. “And I shall be trudging round the bookstores,” she said. “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff. I really don’t.”

Isabel applied Marmite to her toast. “Looking for?” Mimi was a serial book collector, moving from author to author. Her collection of Andrew Lang was virtually complete, as was that of Graham Greene firsts. Isabel continued, “It’s an acquired taste, I suppose. Like the hundred-year eggs that the Chinese eat. You know, the eggs they bury for a hundred days and then dig up and eat. They go wild over them.”

“Arthur Waley,” said Mimi in answer to Isabel’s question.

“He translated Chinese poetry. It was wonderful stuff. And he wrote biographies of some of his poets. It’s quite a thought, isn’t it—there they were in the eighth century or whenever it was and somebody should write their biography twelve hundred years later. An Englishman. So far away. Picking over the lives of these poets.”

That, Isabel agreed, was strange. But so was any act of hom-age to the classical world. Would Catullus have imagined that he would be read after millennia had passed? That people would show an interest in the small details of his life? No, said Mimi, Catullus probably would not. But Horace would. He described, she recollected, his poems as a monument more enduring than bronze; that had struck her as a sign of excessive ego. “But I don’t think that these Chinese poets would have imagined that degree of immortality,” she said. “They led rather remote lives. They were often exiled for some tiny faux pas committed at court. They were sent off to be magistrates in the remote provinces somewhere. And that made their poetry rather wistful, full of regrets.”

Isabel thought for a moment. She was trying to remember 6 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h something by Li Po. She had Waley’s translation of his works in her library, but could only remember a poem about drinking wine by oneself. That was all.

“Li Po drank wine by himself,” she began.

“Indeed he did,” said Mimi. “But so did many of the others.

Chinese poets were always drinking wine and then writing about it. Or waiting for boats to arrive from downriver. Or wondering what absent friends were up to. Brooding about what they were doing.”

“That,” said Isabel, “is the most painful feature of lost love.

You wonder what the other person is doing. Right at this moment. What is he doing?”

There was silence for a moment. Joe put down his slice of toast and looked at his plate. Mimi, from behind the rim of her coffee cup, watched Isabel and thought: Is that what she is thinking now?

W I T H M I M I A N D J O E off on their respective outings, Isabel had the house to herself. It was Grace’s day off, and she had gone to Glasgow to visit a cousin. The house, without Grace, seemed unnaturally quiet, but it gave Isabel the opportunity to work without interruption on her editing. Her desk was piled with manuscripts, the consequence of her dogged adherence to a policy of requiring the submission of articles in printed, rather than electronic, form. She could not read on screen, or at least not for long; the sentences and paragraphs became strangely disjointed, as if they were cut off from that which went before and that which came afterwards. That, of course, was an illu-sion; such paragraphs were just round the corner, just a scroll away—but where was that. Was electronic memory a place?

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Before they appeared on the screen weren’t they just endless lines of noughts and ones, or odd decimals? That, she thought, was the ultimate triumph of reductionism: Shakespeare’s son-nets could be reduced to rows of noughts; or even the works of Proust; although how much electricity would be consumed to render Proust’s long-winded prose digital? Patient wind tur-bines would turn and turn for days in that process. And what about ourselves, and our own reduction? We could each be rendered, could we not, down to a little puddle of water and a tiny heap of minerals. And that was all we were. Imperial Caesar, dead, and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

Or, as binary code might so prosaically put it: 0100100101101

10101110000 . . .

She worked quickly, and by the time that her lawyer telephoned her she had managed to make an impression on the pile of manuscripts; she had read three, and had embarked on the fourth. None of them, she thought, was likely to get past the peer reviewers, which was sad, as each represented months of effort: thought, planning, hopes. But the problem was that they all had the feel of being written to order, by people who had to write these articles—any articles—because they were academ-ics and it was expected of them. This was their output, the basis on which they would be judged; not on whether they were inspirational teachers who could hold a class of students spellbound, could inspire them to think, but on the production of this sheer wordage, which few would read. Most of these articles would not change the world, would not make one iota of difference to anything. She sighed, and looked at the title page of the next article on the pile. “Dust to Dust: Should We Rebury Old Bones?” Her interest was aroused, and she picked up the manuscript. “Bones of five hundred years of age have been the subject 6 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of controversy. Should archaeologists rebury them, or can museums . . .” She sighed again, and imagined for a moment archaeologists digging up old bones, so carefully, with their trowels and brushes, and then, more or less immediately, burying them once more, with reverence.

She rose to her feet to answer the lawyer’s call, taking the telephone with her to the window of her study.

Simon Mackintosh’s voice was precise. “That place that you looked at,” he began. “The one in St. Stephen Street—I registered your interest in it with the seller’s lawyers, as you asked me to do.”

“Good,” said Isabel. “And I’ve decided that I’d like to make an offer. I liked it very much. I was going to call you today to talk about what offer we should put in.” Isabel did not like the Scottish system of selling houses. A property went on the market with an invitation for offers, giving a general guide to where offers should start. But then what started was a blind auction: anybody interested in buying it could put in their best offer in a sealed envelope and, at a preordained time, these would be opened and the highest bidder—normally—would win the auction. This was all very well for sellers, but for purchasers it created an agony of uncertainty, driving people to offer the very most they could afford, just in case somebody else came up with a bigger offer.

Simon laughed. “Well, I’m saving you that call—and with good news. The woman who’s selling it . . .”

“Florence Macreadie.”

“Yes,” Simon continued. “Her lawyer telephoned me and said that she would be very happy to sell it to you—and at a price which is actually lower than the current starting price. Ten thousand below, in fact. So it’s yours if you want it.”

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Isabel said nothing as she absorbed this news. She had never been obliged to bid for a house before, but everything that she had heard from friends who had done so had made her dread the process. It seemed that everyone had their stories of missed properties, of offers that had seemed to be high and yet turned out to be far too low, of houses lost to an offer only five pounds higher; and yet here she was being offered a flat in a popular area of town at a sum below the starting price.

“Isabel?”

“Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I was thinking. I was trying to take in what you said to me. Ten thousand . . .”

Simon sounded bemused. “Below. Yes. Ten thousand below.”

So, thought Isabel, she’s desperate to sell. This means that there is some snag. The neighbours? Basil, the cat they met on the stairway? Ground subsidence affecting the foundations of the building? Fulminating wet rot in the roof space?

Simon interrupted her thoughts. “My first reaction, of course, was to assume that there was some problem with the property. It sounded rather as if she wanted to offload it on you.

That’s what I thought at first.”

Precisely, thought Isabel.

“But then,” Simon went on, “her lawyer told me the reason.

She does have a reason, you know.”

“And that would be?”

Simon hesitated. He sounded embarrassed. “Apparently she was very taken with the idea of your living there. She said that she liked the idea of you living there with your young man.

That’s the term she used. Young man. She said that it appealed to her sense of the romantic.”

Isabel stared out of the window at the spruce tree in the 6 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h front garden. A squirrel was sitting nervously on one of the lower branches, its tail twitching in that curious, jerky way, as if tugged by a string.

Simon continued. “I don’t like to pry, of course. It’s no concern of mine. I thought, though, that you were interested in the flat for Grace—”

“Of course I am,” Isabel said quickly. “Young man . . . Look, Simon, this really is rather funny. I asked Jamie, who is indeed a young man, to help me look over the place. He lives round the corner down there. I thought that she got the wrong end of the stick but couldn’t set her right.” She laughed. “So now she wants to help set me up in a love nest.”

Simon cleared his throat. “Well, I must admit that I was rather surprised. Mind you, why not, Isabel? There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do something like that. You’re a very attractive woman. Take a look in a mirror some day. I’m not speaking as your lawyer now, but as a friend . . .”

“It would be interesting,” Isabel said. And she imagined herself—allowed herself to imagine—walking up the steps to the flat to find Jamie already home, inside, welcoming her, and her cooking a meal for the two of them in the kitchen with the late evening light of summer on the rooftops and a glass of wine in her hand and . . .

“But back to the matter at hand,” Simon said. “What do you want to do? Do you want me to accept her offer to sell it to you?”

Isabel was about to say yes, and then she was struck by doubt. Florence Macreadie’s offer was made on the basis of a false assumption. It was true that Isabel had done nothing to encourage the other woman’s false belief, but could she let her act on it? If she did she would be taking advantage of another’s mistake, which surely was wrong. It would be like . . . What T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

6 9

would it be like? Like buying a valuable antique from a vulnerable old person who had no idea of what the thing was worth.

People did that, did they not? Unscrupulous dealers would spot a valuable item in the possession of somebody who had no clue as to its value and they would buy it for a paltry sum. It would be a valid sale from a strictly legal point of view, but morally it was something quite different. If she took the flat from Florence on these terms, then it would be taking something from her which she would not have offered had she known the truth.

“Can you let me think about this?” asked Isabel.

“Of course.”

“And is there any legal reason to turn it down?” she asked.

Simon paused before giving his answer. “No legal reason, as far as I can see. But . . . morally, I think that you wouldn’t want somebody to be disadvantaged by a false impression she laboured under.” Simon paused for a moment. “I hope that you don’t mind my saying that. You’re the one who knows all about ethics . . .”

Isabel’s response was immediate. “You’re quite right. Of course I can’t let her act on that strange idea. Of course not.”

Simon’s relief was evident in his voice. “I thought you’d come to that conclusion. I’ll let her lawyer know that his client was—how shall we put it?—misinformed. Then we can come up with a bid, same as anybody else.”

Isabel agreed, and after the exchange of a few niceties the conversation came to an end. She turned back to her desk, but did not sit down immediately. She stood for a good few minutes, staring at the books on her shelf, the serried ranks of titles.

Kant. Schopenhauer. Midgley. Kekes. All these people who had spent so much time, given up on so many other diversions (one assumed) in order to devote themselves to the elucidation of 7 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h what was right. And here she had been faced with a moment of financial temptation—the saving of ten thousand pounds—and she had hesitated in her response. She had almost said yes. She had almost told Simon that they should accept Florence’s offer immediately. She had almost done that. And everything on those shelves, all the elaborate structures of right and wrong, had been for a few moments forgotten. Which is how most people acted when it came to temptation. They gave in. And we should never forget, thought Isabel, that every one of us is capable of doing the same thing if the gain that we see for ourselves is large enough. She had often thought that if she were ever to give in to a yearning for the material it would have to be a very large sum; her price would be a high one—a kingdom. But now she had seen that the opposite was, in fact, true. Her price was as low as anybody else’s. And if she could give in over a mere matter of ten thousand pounds, could she not give in over the mere matter of a young man, a musician, whose company she so appreciated and whose profile, at the right angle, stopped her heart?

I have learned something about myself, thought Isabel.

C H A P T E R S I X

E

JOE AND MIMI settled into their routine. He went off to the National Library each morning and returned shortly after five in the evening. He seemed pleased with what he found. It was slow work, he said, and he was not sure what it would bring forth—a book, perhaps, but not a big book; an article certainly, that he would send to people who were interested in this sort of thing. Joe knew them all and they would send him their articles too. “The dean loves us to write these things,” he said. “It gives him a warm feeling.”

Mimi looked for Arthur Waley and one or two other authors.

She found a first edition of the life of Li Po, in good condition, with the dust jacket, which pleased her, and some Auden, which pleased Isabel, but which would not have pleased Auden, as it was a pamphlet, elegantly set and printed, of “Spain 1937,” a poem which he disowned.

“I feel disloyal when I read the poems he disliked,” said Isabel. “Even that marvellous ‘September 1, 1939.’ Remember the poem? It had those lines at the end which people in New York copied and sent to one another in consolation in that other 7 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h terrible September. But Auden said it was all wrong. He didn’t mean it any more.”

Mimi took off her spectacles and polished them on a square of soft silk. “But people take different things from works of art.

The poem, the painting, changes.”

Isabel suddenly laughed, and Mimi looked at her cousin in puzzlement. “Amused?”

Isabel shook her head. “Sorry, not anything you said. I’ve just remembered what happened to my friend Gill Salvesen.

She’s an amateur printmaker. One of her prints was taken by a gallery and they inadvertently hung it sideways. She heard about it and was going to tell them about their mistake, but before she could do so, a friend of hers bought it and hung it in her house—sideways. Gill didn’t know what to do.”

Mimi smiled. “Well, that makes the same point, doesn’t it?

People see different meanings.”

“But there may be a real meaning. And if somebody doesn’t know that, shouldn’t we tell her?”

Mimi pointed upstairs. “What about that McTaggart in our room? What if I thought that it represented people arriving in Scotland rather than emigrating?”

“In art, immigrants don’t look sad,” countered Isabel. “They look apprehensive. Or even quite excited.”

“But would you tell me that? Would you tell me that if what gave the painting meaning for me was the thought that it was all about arrival?”

“I might let you carry on thinking that,” conceded Isabel.

“Well, there you are,” said Mimi.

Then Mimi said something which was to make a difference.

It had nothing to do with their discussion of art, but was a social arrangement which she and Joe wanted to propose.

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“We wondered if you were free the weekend after next,”

Mimi said. “There are some people we know who are here in Scotland for the summer. They’ve taken a large house outside town—Joe knows exactly where it is. One of these Scottish fortified houses. Somewhere near Peebles, I think. Anyway, they—or rather he, we don’t really know her—asked us whether we would come out for the weekend. They’re happy to make it a house party. They know we’re staying with you, so you’re invited.”

Isabel was free that weekend, and the idea of a house party appealed.

“Good,” said Mimi. “We’ll get in touch with them. Or Joe will, rather.”

Isabel was curious. “Who are they?”

“Dallas people,” said Mimi. “He’s called Tom Bruce. She’s called Angie. She’s his fiancée. Second time round, of course.

For him. I don’t know about her.”

There was something in Mimi’s tone that made it clear to Isabel that Angie was not in favour. That was not unusual, of course; an old friend remarried and, try as one might, the new wife was not quite the same. Countless friendships had foundered on that rock.

“You’re not too keen on her?” Isabel asked gently.

“I don’t like to be uncharitable,” said Mimi.

“Which is what people say before being uncharitable.”

“Well,” drawled Mimi. “Well . . . Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. But put it this way: she’s a good bit younger than he is. And he’s . . .”

“Very well-off?”

“Exactly. Even by the standards of Preston Hollow, where he lives, he’s not hard up. Do you remember Preston Hollow from your Dallas visits?”

7 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel did not. But Mimi’s point was clear.

“He was one of those property people who acquired large tracts of land out near the airport. All that nothing acreage that nobody was interested in. Well, that changed, and Tom did very nicely. Not that anybody resented it. He’s a really nice man. He supports the symphony and the new museum. And he always said that he would support the law school too, but hasn’t exactly gotten round to it just yet.

“Yes,” Mimi continued. “Everybody has time for Tom. We don’t see a great deal of him, but now and then we do. He’s quite a shy man, really. His confidence was pretty dented by his condition. Do you know about Bell’s palsy?”

They were sitting together in the drawing room at the time.

Isabel had given Mimi a glass of New Zealand white wine, and she was holding her own glass, half full. She put it down on the table beside her. In her mind she saw the man in the gallery. She saw the face wrenched up at one side in that disfiguring grimace. That was Tom. That was who he was.

“I knew I was going to see him again,” she muttered. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?” asked Mimi, taking a sip of her wine.

“I think I’ve met them,” said Isabel. “Just pure coincidence.

I saw them in a gallery. They were buying a painting, I think.”

“That’s them,” said Mimi. “She’s on a spending spree, I gather. Paintings. Rugs. Even a racehorse, somebody said.”

“But I had the impression that he was the one who was—”

“He’ll do anything to please her,” said Mimi. “Poor Tom.”

I S A B E L M E T CAT for lunch that day, at two o’clock—a late lunch, but that was when the busy time in the delicatessen T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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came to an end and Cat could leave Eddie at the counter while she took a break with Isabel at one of the tables. She had made Isabel a special Greek salad, which is what she knew she liked: salty cheese crumbled over olives and sliced boiled egg. Cat herself liked tomatoes and mozzarella.

“I haven’t thanked you for the other night,” said Cat. “We both enjoyed it. I love seeing Mimi and Joe, although they always make me feel a bit stick-in-the-mud. All the travelling they do.”

“I don’t know,” said Isabel. “You went to Italy not all that long ago. And you had those six months in Australia.”

Cat looked wistful. She had spent six months in Australia after university, working in a series of casual jobs, travelling and seeing the country. It had been the most perfect time of her life, and she could not think of it without a feeling of nostalgia. “Yes.

There was that. But that was then. Now is different. Now is here. And tomorrow will be here.”

Isabel speared an olive with her fork. “Not necessarily,” she said. “All sorts of things can happen. You might . . .”

Cat looked at her. “Yes? I might what?”

Isabel had been thinking of marriage. That was the obvious thing that could change Cat’s life and get her out of her rut, if that’s what she thought she was in. Marriage had changed Isabel’s own life—for the worse, but not every marriage did that.

One would have to be massively cynical to see marriage in that light. Were most marriages happy? Somewhere she had read that with increased participation by women in economic life—

as more women began to have their own careers—so the levels of happiness in marriage went down. Women in Sweden and countries like that, where women were free and independent, were apparently less happy in their marriages than women in 7 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h those countries where they had less power and participated less in the working world. Well, if that were the case, she thought, then that meant that there was something wrong with conventional marriage, rather than something wrong with freedom.

She could not tell Cat that she had been thinking of marriage, because she was not at all sure whether Cat wanted to get married. So many people no longer bothered, but just lived together, or left it for years and years before doing anything about formalities. But was that what Cat really wanted? Or did she want somebody to come along and make a public commitment to her, as people used to do with marriage, as she had done with John Liamor?

“I might what?” repeated Cat.

“You might meet somebody,” said Isabel.

Cat looked down at her plate, and Isabel knew that they were in awkward territory. She had learned her lesson, and was determined not to repeat the mistake she had made over Cat’s involvement with Toby. But there was no reason for Cat to take offence over a very ordinary reference to the possibility of meeting somebody, and so Isabel said, “You could find yourself in a relationship with somebody who worked somewhere else, for example. That happens, you know. What if you met an Australian you liked and you thought you might go off together to Melbourne or Perth or somewhere? That happens, a lot. And the other way round too. Somebody from Australia meets somebody from London and goes to live there.”

It did. There were love stories happening all the time in circumstances just like that; stories unsung, but as heroic and moving in their way as those that had been sung; we could not all be Tristan and Isolde, even if we were separated from one another by oceans and circumstance, but the whole point about T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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the great myths was that they were about exactly the things that we all experienced and recognised.

“You could meet somebody too,” said Cat. “An Australian philosopher. How about that? And then you’d be living in Melbourne.”

“I’d like that,” said Isabel.

“Melbourne? Or meeting somebody?”

She thought for a moment. “Well, I did go to Melbourne once, you know. And I found it fascinating. I’d be very happy there, I think. I love the Australian landscape. I like Australians.”

But that was not what Cat had wanted to find out. She had hardly ever discussed John Liamor with Isabel—there had been an unspoken understanding about that—and she knew that there was concealed pain there. But Isabel was a vivacious, attractive woman, and men liked her. There was no reason why she should not have a lover; or none that Cat could see.

“But what about meeting somebody?” asked Cat. “Australian or otherwise. There are plenty of men in Scotland, you know. Have you thought . . .”

Isabel had another olive to attend to. She thought: She doesn’t know, Cat doesn’t know that I have met somebody and that it’s Jamie. Yes, she had met him, but that was not what Cat meant. Cat’s question was about the meeting of somebody who would actually be suitable for her, who would be about her age, in his early forties, maybe a bit older. That’s what her question meant.

And for a few moments, Isabel was confused. She was confused because she knew that this was something that she had not confronted. She had been so scarred by what had happened with John Liamor that she had decided that she would be best off by herself. And then what had happened was that she had 7 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h found that of course she needed a man, and she had found herself falling for Jamie because he was there and he was so attractive and sympathetic and nobody could help but fall for him.

The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved. WHA again had seen that when he had written about his love, as a boy, for a pumping engine. I . . . thought it every bit as beautiful as you. Of course it was. Love required an object, he said. That was all.

“I’d like to meet somebody,” she said. “Yes. I would. Yes.”

She looked up from her Greek salad, from the small, blissful world of olives and sliced boiled egg, and met Cat’s gaze.

Now Cat did not know what to say. What she thought was: Good, she’s over that awful Irishman. Good. But she did not know what to say because she had said that there were plenty of men in Scotland, but the fact of the matter was that there were not. There was a shortage of eligible men because of . . . what?

Demographic reasons: the death of men; all those men who died from working too hard and living at the wrong pace, whose final seconds must be filled with such regrets for all they had given to their work? The social acceptance of the gay alternative? She could not think of anybody suitable for Isabel, not one man, not one. He would have to be intelligent and urbane; he would have to have a sense of humour. She knew nobody over thirty-five who fitted those requirements who was not already married or with somebody or gay.

Isabel smiled at her. She felt better for having said, and thought, what she had just said. She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry: the load of being ourselves. “But of course,” she said, “I shouldn’t talk about meeting other men. There’s Patrick.”

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There was a slight cooling of the atmosphere. “I haven’t known him that long,” said Cat defensively. “He’s not necessarily the one.”

“Of course not,” said Isabel hurriedly. “I enjoyed meeting him, by the way.”

Cat looked away. “He enjoyed meeting you too.” Isabel was not sure if this was true or if it was just politeness on Cat’s part—or on Patrick’s part, for that matter. She doubted whether he would really have enjoyed meeting her; there had been no warmth in their encounter—although she told herself that she really had tried; they were just too dissimilar.

There was a silence. Over at the counter, Eddie finished serving a customer and stretched his arms above his head, yawning. He looked towards Isabel and lowered his arms sheepishly, as if caught doing something furtive. “Tired?” Isabel mouthed to him across the room, and he nodded.

“Patrick is fun,” said Cat suddenly, as if she had just thought of a reason why she should like him. “He makes me laugh. He’s witty.”

Isabel tried to conceal her surprise. She could not recall much of Patrick’s conversation, but it did not seem to her it had been witty. “That’s important in a man,” she said. “I can imagine nothing worse than being with a man who has no sense of humour. Just imagine it. It would like being in the desert.” She paused. “Have you met his mother yet? He lives at home, doesn’t he?”

“I’ve met her once or twice,” Cat replied. “She’s a local politician. She used to be in charge of—”

Isabel raised a hand. “Of course! I thought that Patrick’s name was familiar. Cynthia Vaughan. That’s his mother. I’ve met her too. Several times. We were on a committee together.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“That’s her,” said Cat. “They live in Murrayfield. Near St.

George’s School.”

Isabel placed her knife and fork on her empty plate. This was not particularly good news. Cynthia Vaughan was the last woman she would wish on Cat. She was a powerful, rather hec-toring woman, almost a parody of the pushy local politician. Any son of hers would have a battle escaping from a mother like that. That was why he still lived at home, thought Isabel. She won’t let him leave.

“She’s not a woman I would care to disagree with,” Isabel said cautiously.

The note of defensiveness came back into Cat’s voice. “She was perfectly nice to me.”

“I’m sure she was,” reassured Isabel. But she thought, with some relief perhaps, Patrick is not going to last. The choice is going to be between Cat and his mother. And the mother will win, because she was the sort who had never allowed herself to lose a political battle, and the fight between mothers wanting to hold on to their sons and the women who wanted to take their sons away was a battle royal, more dogged than the Battle of Bannockburn, more poignant than the clash at Culloden Moor.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

E

SHE CLIMBED THE STAIRS to Jamie’s flat in Saxe-Coburg Street. She occasionally called in unannounced, which he did not seem to mind, and he did the same to her; neither was offended if the other was busy and made that apparent. Jamie had to practise, and she had to edit. Both knew that these activities took precedence over social activities.

He had an old-fashioned bell pull, which he had restored to working order and of which he was inordinately proud. A small brass arm, complete with clenched hand and cuffs, that hung at the side of his door could be pulled downwards, causing a bell inside to sound briefly. A couple of tugs would produce a longer, more insistent peal. Isabel pulled the bell handle, glancing at the fanlight above the door. The glass in the fanlight, Jamie had said, was the original pane put in when the tenement was built in 1850. “You can tell old glass,” he said. “It is thicker at the bottom than at the top. It’s liquid, you see. It very slowly sags downwards.” Like people, thought Isabel.

Jamie answered the door and from his expression she knew immediately that he was not busy; this was not the I’m-in-the-8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h middle-of-something face. He smiled at her and gestured for her to come in. “I was about to phone you,” he said.

Isabel took off the light raincoat she had been wearing—it was one of those days which could not decide between wet and dry—and hung it over the chair in the hallway. Jamie’s flat was not large: a small hallway gave onto a living room off which was a bedroom; these rooms, together with a generous-sized kitchen and a cramped bathroom, completed the accommoda-tion. Jamie taught bassoon in the living room, where there was an upright piano in one corner. Most of his teaching was done in schools, but the occasional private pupil came to the flat, especially boys from the Academy, which was more or less next door.

If the wind was in the right direction, as it was now, one might hear the school’s pipe band practising, the wailing of the pipes drifting across the rooftops. It could be worse, Jamie had said.

Imagine living in Ramsey Garden and having the Military Tat-too taking place in one’s backyard every night for a month. And Isabel had listened for a moment and said: “I have nothing against ‘Lochaber No More.’ That’s what they’re playing.”

“Something like that,” said Jamie. “I don’t notice it, really.

It’s just part of the background. Like the traffic.”

Isabel listened. There was no traffic sound, as far as she could tell, just the pipes. She glanced at Jamie. How strange it must be to be entirely beautiful—did one think about it?

Did one see the heads turn? He did not, she thought; he seemed blissfully unaware of what he looked like, and seemed not to care. He was just easy with it, which was part of his charm. There was nothing more unattractive than narcissism, she thought; nothing could transform beauty into a cloying, unattractive quality than that self-conscious appreciation of self. There was none of that in Jamie.

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“Mimi and I were talking about it. ‘Lochaber No More,’ ” said Isabel. “That McTaggart upstairs in my house made me think about it. And now . . .” She moved to the living-room window and looked out over the roofs towards the Academy. The pipes died away; the last notes had been reached. The air now seemed very still; what had been light rain was now mist, and there were signs of the sun trying to break through. “That’s the trouble with our weather,” she continued. “It doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

“I like it,” said Jamie. “It keeps us on our toes. I’m not sure that I would like the predictability of living in Sicily or somewhere like that. I’d miss our skies.”

“I suppose so,” said Isabel. “But then, every so often I have this yearning to go away altogether. To get away from Scotland and its weather. I could very easily live in the south of France, you know. In fact, I may go one of these days.”

Jamie, who had been standing near the piano, fiddling with a bassoon reed, looked up sharply. “You’re not seriously thinking of going, are you?” There was an edge of anxiety in his voice, which Isabel had noticed and which had given her a sudden, wild moment of hope. He did not want her to go.

She smiled at him. “A fantasy,” she said. “From time to time I see myself doing something completely different, something exotic, but I never do anything about it. And it’s not just the south of France. It’s Thailand, Cambodia, India. Can’t you see yourself in a small village on one of those Thai islands, leading the life of a Gauguin . . . that was the South Seas of course. Not exactly next door.”

“Or Robert Louis Stevenson,” interjected Jamie.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Or RLS. Yes. But not quite.”

“Maybe we could go away together,” mused Jamie. “You could be Robinson Crusoe and I could be your Man Friday.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel laughed. “Have you ever looked at Defoe’s illustra-tions?” she asked. “Have you noticed that all that Robinson Crusoe sees on the beach is a single footprint? Not two footprints, just one. Have you ever thought of how odd that is?”

“Because he had two feet?”

“Precisely. When we see him later in the book, he definitely has two legs and two feet. We see him.”

“He must have been hopping at the time.” Jamie suggested.

“Very odd.”

“Yes. Authorial inattention. I see it all the time when I’m editing the Review. Even my philosophers can be very sloppy.”

Then she thought: He said, Maybe we could go away together. He had said that, and she, stupidly, had started on about Defoe and Man Friday having only one foot, when what she should have said was, Yes, let’s. Let’s go away. She should have said that straight away because it was the time to say it, and now she could hardly go back to the lost moment. Patrick Kavanagh, she thought. He wrote a poem which she always remembered, about two young people in a boat and one does not say what he wants to say to the other and has a lifetime to regret his mistake.

A lifetime. And Robert Graves wrote a poem about the bird of love and said that when he is in your grasp you must clutch him tightly; and there was Herrick, too, busy gathering his rosebuds, as everybody could recite, or at least everybody who had sat at the feet of the dry-as-dust Miss Macleod at George Watson’s Ladies College in George Square; all these poets who warned us, warned us not to lose the opportunity, and yet we did, as Miss Macleod herself had obviously done.

“Yes,” said Jamie, suddenly. “Yes. We could go off somewhere. I’ve always wanted to go to Kerala. I’ve always wanted to see—what’s the name of that place? Cochin?”

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“It’s Kochi now,” said Isabel. “But it’s the same place.” She paused. The sun had won the struggle with the mist and there was a broad ray of light slanting in from the window onto Jamie’s red Turkish rug. Tiny flecks of dust floated in the light, like miniature planes swirling in space. She looked up at Jamie. “I’d like that,” she said. “I went to Cochin once. I could show you.”

Jamie had taken a step forward and was standing in front of her. The ray of sun now fell on his forearm. Isabel saw how it penetrated the thin cotton of his shirt, revealing the arm beneath. When she was a child she had held her hand up to the light and imagined that she could see the bones of her fingers through the flesh. And one of the boys from further down the street, the one who became a doctor and who died in Mozam-bique, had possessed a pair of X-ray specs which he had donned and claimed to be able to see through clothing. She thought of him from time to time, and of his sad, avoidable death at the hands of a youthful carjacker, and saw not the grown man, who had tried to do something about human suffering, but the small boy with his X-ray specs and his tricks.

“Look at this reed,” Jamie said, handing Isabel the shaved double reed that fitted to the end of the bassoon’s elegant crook.

“Look how badly it’s twisted. I’ve used it four, maybe five times, and now this.”

She took the reed from him and examined it. It was an intricately made, rather fiddly object: two thin strips of reed, curved, laid side to side, and then bound at the base in a neat turban of red thread. Jamie sometimes made his own reeds, but he also bought them from a man who lived on a farm somewhere in England. He had spoken of this man before, who was called Ben, and she had imagined a bucolic scene with Ben sitting under a tree in his farmyard, shaving and tying reeds, while 8 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h geese strutted around him. It would not be like that, of course; the farm would have stopped producing anything except bassoon and oboe reeds, and Ben would be a displaced urbanite.

“They’re such odd-looking things,” said Isabel. “And they make that ridiculous squawk when you blow them. Not that I can do it.”

Jamie took the reed from her hand. “You don’t know how to do it properly. I’ll show you.” He turned the reed round so that the tip was towards Isabel. “Open your lips. Just a little bit. Like this. See. Like this.”

She did so, and he positioned the reed, but then withdrew it suddenly, and the back of his hand was against her lips, pressed gently against them. It was as if he had given his hand to be kissed in some courtly gesture. He moved it away. He was looking at her. Now he leaned forward and the hand kiss became a real kiss. Just briefly. Then he drew back and stared down at the carpet, at the now-enlarged square of sunlight.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled without looking at her. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

She was about to reassure him, to reach out and take his hand, but he had turned away. “I was going to make you coffee,”

he said. “Come through to the kitchen. Or stay in here, if you prefer. I can bring it through.”

Isabel said that she would go with him, and she followed him into the kitchen. She looked at the nape of his neck. She looked at his shirt, tucked carelessly into his jeans; for some reason, she glanced at her watch and noticed the time, as if to commit to memory the moment, the precise moment, of her transformation.

He busied himself with the making of coffee. He could have turned round, but his back was to her and the thought T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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crossed her mind that this was to hide his embarrassment. He made a remark about a concert in which he was to play the following week. He said something about one of the pieces of music, about how he had met the composer and of how disappointing it had been. “He had nothing to say about his work, you know; nothing.”

Isabel said, “People don’t always like to talk about what they’ve done.” And she thought immediately: Yes, he had kissed her and now would not talk about it. She had not meant it in that sense, but Jamie picked up on it. “Sometimes we do things on impulse,” he said. “And the best thing may be to pretend that it never happened. But that hardly applies to a composition, surely?”

It was a ridiculous idea, and they both laughed, which went some way to defusing the tension. But when he brought over her cup of coffee, she noticed that his hand was shaking very slightly. The sight touched her. So he had been affected by what had happened in the same way as she had. It had been something important for him, not just a peck on the cheek between friends.

She put her coffee down on the square pine table that dominated the kitchen and sat on one of the chairs beside it.

“Jamie—” she began, but he cut her off.

“Let’s not,” he said. “Let’s not go there.”

For a moment she felt wounded. It seemed to her that he was viewing their moment of intimacy with distaste, as one would remember but decline to dissect a social solecism. And what exactly did Let’s not go there mean? Did it mean that the incident itself was not to be remembered, or that he did not wish to get emotionally involved with her? Was there a state of entanglement that he wanted to avoid? There were many rea-8 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sons why he should think that way about it, and Isabel had thought about them all. And dominating everything was the sheer brute fact that fourteen years lay between them. Fourteen years. Jamie would want a contemporary; indeed she knew which contemporary he really wanted. Cat. And Cat was her niece. Did that not make matters problematic?

And yet, and yet . . . Would anybody raise an eyebrow if a man of thirty-eight took up with a woman of twenty-four? That was a gap of fourteen years, and there were plenty of such liaisons, which people seemed to accept readily enough. How old were Levin and Kitty? That sort of thing was quite different from the real cradle-snatch, from Humbert Humbert and his Lolita. She and Jamie were two adults, one a bit older than the other, but with the same interests and the same sense of humour. Why should I not love him? she asked herself. How absurd that we should deny ourselves something when our moment of life is so brief, our very world so transitory.

And now, sitting with her coffee, in silence, she thought of Auden’s line: how rich life had been and how silly. She knew what that meant, she understood it; but the difficulty lay in trying to explain to somebody that it didn’t matter, it simply didn’t matter. Jamie did not want to take a risk. She now did. They were simply not in the same place. She was here, and he was there. That was the topography of unrequited love; there were many hills, unscalable peaks, continents separated by wide oceans of misunderstanding, of indifference.

She drained the last of her coffee, glanced at her watch and rose from her seat. She took a step forward and placed a kiss on the side of his cheek, a chaste kiss of the sort that friends give one another. She noticed that he was tense as she approached him—the body conveys so much without movement of any T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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sort—and then the tension dissolved after her kiss. “I have to go.”

He nodded. “And I have a pupil coming in”—he looked at his watch—“fifteen minutes.”

She said goodbye and made her way down the stairs. Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn’t. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place.

C H A P T E R E I G H T

E

IT WAS MIMI who suggested over breakfast that Isabel should meet their hosts before they went to spend the weekend with them. “They come into Edinburgh a lot,” she said. “And Joe and I would like to entertain them. It would be a way of returning their hospitality before the occasion, so to speak.”

Isabel agreed; it would give her an opportunity to meet Tom and Angie before she went to stay with them, which would be helpful. The meeting in the gallery, such as it was, had not been a positive one, and a relaxed meeting in a social setting could help. They could come to her house, she suggested, but Mimi objected that this would not involve Joe and her reciprocating hospitality. Isabel still thought it better. Angie had snubbed her once already, in the gallery; she could hardly do that in Isabel’s own home. “Mimi, you cook,” Isabel said. “It can be your show.

I’ll hand over the kitchen. And you’re a better cook than I am.

Far better.”

There was another reason why dinner at her house would be a good idea. She had not seen Jamie since that afternoon encounter in his flat, and she was waiting for an occasion when they could see one another in the company of other people; this T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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would make it easier. She would put it to him that she needed to make up numbers—which she did—and he would not think that she was pursuing him. Which she was not—she was definitely not pursuing him—but did she want to see him again, and soon? Yes, she did.

When she called him with the invitation, she was relieved to discover that everything seemed normal. He would be very happy to come to dinner, he said. He was having a trying week of rehearsals with a conductor who for some reason didn’t like him. Isabel privately thought that unlikely; nobody could dislike Jamie, except Cat perhaps, and that was odd, and Cat’s fault, her blind spot, her perversity.

But Jamie was sure. “He has it in for me,” he told Isabel.

“He always picks on me. Always. He says that I don’t have the dynamics quite right. He says my playing sounds feverish. What does he mean by that?”

“Con fuoco,” said Isabel. “That’s the closest I can get to it.”

“But why do you think he picks on me?” Jamie asked peevishly.

Isabel could guess. Envy. That, in her mind, was one of the commonest causes of petty behaviour like that. “He envies you,”

she said.

Jamie laughed. “Why should he envy me? He’s a successful conductor. Much in demand—for some inexplicable reason. He has no reason to envy anybody.”

At the other end of the telephone, Isabel smiled. “Do I know him?” she asked. “Describe him to me.”

Jamie gave her the name, which she did not recognise.

Then he went on, “He’s on the short side. Rather pudgy. Gets red in the face when the tempo increases. Waves his arms about.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Envy, she thought. Jamie was tall. He was good-looking. He never went red in the face. What she was tempted to say was: He wants to be you, or, perhaps, more poignantly, He wants you and cannot have you, but she could not say that. Jamie would not imagine that he could be the object of desire; it was not in his nature to think that. So she simply said, “Envy,” and left it at that.

Isabel accompanied Mimi to buy the provisions for the dinner. They walked into Bruntsfield; they could get some of the things from Cat, the others from the collection of small stores that lined Bruntsfield Place on both sides. They walked along Merchiston Crescent slowly, as if out for a stroll; Isabel was a quick walker, but not now, as Mimi stopped several times to remark on a glimpse of garden or to address remarks to cats she saw sunning themselves on low garden walls. “Paying my respects,” she said to Isabel. “This is their territory, you know.”

And Isabel saw that the cats appeared to understand this, and sidled up to Mimi, recognising their ally.

And then, on the way back, laden down with shopping bags, when they had stopped briefly at the top of East Castle Road, Mimi turned to Isabel and asked her how much she remembered of her mother. Nothing had provoked the question—it just occurred. “You were still so young when she died,” she said.

“Eleven is young. Memories of the years before that can become hazy. Unreliable even.”

“Some memories are clear enough,” said Isabel. “Walking along this street, for example. I remember that very well. I remember holding her hand and walking along here. Just as we’ve been doing.”

Mimi nodded. “I can see the two of you. I can see it.” She touched Isabel on the arm, briefly, the gesture of an older T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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cousin. “Whatever time it happens in your life—whenever it is that your parents die—you miss them, don’t you? It’s the end of such a chapter. Two of the most important actors in the play are written out.”

“I miss her a lot,” said Isabel. “I can’t say that I think of her every day, but I think of her often. She comes into my mind, as if she’s still here. A presence.”

“As it should be,” said Mimi.

“We idealise them, don’t we?” Isabel went on, swapping her bags from hand to hand to redistribute the load. “I’ve sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to have a parent who did something really awful—what it would be like if one discovered that. I knew somebody who did, you know. The effect on her life was devastating. Everything changed for her. She was happy one moment and then the next . . .”

“What happened?”

“It was a girl I knew at university, at Cambridge. She was in my college; a rather sporty girl who played tennis, I think, and something else. She found out that her father had been seeing a prostitute. He was the chairman of a bank and this woman was blackmailing him.”

“That’s hardly unusual,” said Mimi. “And the fact that he was being blackmailed almost turns him into a victim, doesn’t it?”

They resumed their walk. “He would have been the victim of the story,” Isabel continued, “except, as they say, for one little thing. He tried to hire somebody to kill her. And he was discovered. The man he approached developed cold feet and went to the police. They wired him with a tape recorder and this gave them the evidence they needed. His trial was all over the papers, and this poor girl had to sit it out. Nobody spoke to her about it. In fact, somebody thoughtfully removed the newspa-9 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h pers from the common room on the day his conviction was reported. We all pretended it just hadn’t happened, whereas we should have talked to her about it. We should have given her some support.”

“Of course,” said Mimi. “But at that age one doesn’t want to face up to things like that. One thinks that cheerful denial is better. But I suppose it never is.”

Isabel wondered about that. She knew people who did very well on cheerful denial; rather better, she suspected, than if they faced up to the problem. Cheerful denial was certainly one way of dealing with an illness, and those who denied often fared better because optimism, and laughter, had a strong psycho-somatic effect. But this conversation was about parents. “I don’t know how I would have handled it if my parents had had affairs,” said Isabel. “Or tried to kill somebody. I think that it must be one of the most difficult things for children to handle—having affairs, that is. I know that people can’t help themselves—well, I count myself fortunate that I didn’t have that to deal with.”

Mimi was silent for a few moments. Then she said, quietly,

“No. It can’t be easy. It can’t be easy for anybody.”

They came to the top of Isabel’s street. In a garden on the corner, a large secluded square of land behind a high stone wall, the branches of a cluster of elms moved slowly in the breeze.

Behind them, the sky was clear, intersected by the vapour trail of an aircraft, heading west. Isabel pointed to the line of white, and Mimi looked up, through her large oval glasses. Isabel saw the sky reflected in the lenses, a shimmer of blue.

“One of the things I regret,” she said to Mimi as they looked up, “one of the things I regret most is never having known my sainted American mother as an adult. I suppose I would have T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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known more about her if I had. As it is, I don’t really know that much.”

Mimi let her gaze move earthwards. “Of course, that’s what you call her, isn’t it? Your sainted American mother. That’s very nice.”

“Would you be able to tell me about her?” Isabel asked suddenly. She looked at Mimi, her eyes filled with eagerness.

“Would you mind? Just tell me everything you know about her.

What sort of person she was—from the adult point of view. Was she happy? What moved her? Give me an idea of who she was.”

Mimi did not reply, and Isabel asked her again.

“Do you want the unvarnished truth?” Mimi asked.

Isabel’s expression was serious. The truth was a serious matter. “Of course I do,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell me anything but the truth, would you?”

“People sometimes don’t want to hear everything about their parents,” said Mimi. “Not everything.”

Isabel was vehement in her denial of this. She wanted to hear it all, she said. After all, it’s not as if there were any serious skeletons in the cupboard.

Mimi stopped and stared at Isabel. “But what if there were?”

Isabel’s answer came quickly. “I’d want to hear about them,”

she said. “Definitely.”

Mimi seemed unconvinced. “Are you sure?”

“Very sure. And the fact that you’ve mentioned this means that there is something.” She paused. “Tell me, Mimi. You have to tell me now.”

“I hadn’t planned to,” said Mimi, doubtfully. “It’s not . . .”

Isabel spoke gravely now. “Please. You’ve made me doubt—

not that I’m blaming you for that—but you have. You can’t stop 9 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now.” If Mimi left anything unsaid now, then it would prey on her mind. She might even wonder if her mother had tried to have somebody killed—ridiculous thought. The grocer, perhaps. Or one of her bridge four—for irresponsible bidding.

Mimi spoke evenly, in a matter-of-fact way, as a lawyer might do in addressing a court. “Your mother had an affair,” said Mimi. “She had an affair and never had the chance to confess to your father, or to make her peace with him. It was while she was having the affair that she discovered she was ill—that she was diagnosed with cancer. And by then she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. So he never found out. Or that’s what she told me. Which was better, don’t you think?” She had not understood why Hibby had had that affair. Sex? Is that all that affairs were about, or was it boredom, the sense of being trapped, the need for a form of companionship that a spouse cannot provide?

Their marriage had been a good one, Mimi had thought, and there had been no signs of an itch. But that, perhaps, was what itches were by nature: invisible.

They were halfway down the street. Isabel did not stop, but looked firmly at the pavement below her feet. The concrete was broken—the result of years of civic neglect, because this was a prosperous area and the authorities had other priorities. The well-off are never popular; they are tolerated, envied too, but not actually liked. She saw one or two places where weeds had taken hold in the cracks and had forced the surface upwards with the power of their roots. She listened to Mimi.

“And the man with whom she had this affair,” Mimi went on, “this man, who’s still around by the way—I saw him the other day, here in town—he dropped her; he dropped your mother when he heard that she was ill. That wasn’t his plan, you see. Your mother was very attractive, and it was fine to have an T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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affair with a beautiful, engaging woman, even if she was somebody else’s wife—that made it more exciting for him, I suppose.

But it was quite another thing to have an affair with a woman who was dying of breast cancer. The sick are not romantic, not really, in spite of Rodolfo and my namesake in their garret. It’s a different sort of love that puts up with illness. Old love.”

They were at Isabel’s gate now. Mimi looked anxiously at her. She wondered whether she should have told her. She had never intended to, but Isabel had insisted, and she had thought that it was the right thing to do. But now, looking at Isabel, she wondered whether it would have been better to lie.

“Should I have told you all that?” she asked, taking hold of Isabel’s arm. “Or should I have kept it from you?”

Isabel was a philosopher. She was perfectly aware that in moral philosophy it was widely agreed that paternalism was unjustifiable except in a very limited number of cases. We should not lie to people, and we should not keep from them the truth that they want to hear. Of course Mimi should have told her, because truth had to be told. And yet, could she ever use the expression my sainted American mother again?

She had had an affair. Well. She was human. Red-blooded.

Women had affairs all the time; only a false sense of propriety made us pretend that this did not happen; the Madame Bovary within us, she thought, within every married woman. But what about this man, the man who had treated her so shabbily? What had been the allure that had driven her mother—her sainted American mother—yes!—out of the arms of her husband and into his? At the door to the house, as she slipped the key into the lock, she turned to Mimi and asked her, “What was he like?

This other man. What was he like?”

“He was much younger than she was,” said Mimi.

C H A P T E R N I N E

E

LATER THAT DAY, Isabel stood in Rutland Square, that quiet, perfect Georgian square tucked away behind the busy end of Princes Street, under the shadow, almost, of the castle and its towering Calvinist rock. Like so many places in the city, it had its associations for her. There was the Scottish Arts Club on the other side, where she had gone to parties that had gone on into the small hours, where utterly memorable conversations had taken place, and been forgotten in spite of their brilliance; there was the corner where, during her student days, home from Cambridge, she had embraced that boy she had met in the bar at the Caledonian Hotel, that student from Aberdeen, who had met up with her a few evenings later and with whom she had enjoyed a brief flirtation; and then he had gone back to Aberdeen and she had realised that they meant nothing to each other. That was before John Liamor, about whom now, curiously, she seemed to be thinking less.

Was she? Since she had met John, just over twenty years ago, she had thought about him, one way or another, every day.

In the beginning, when she had been in his thrall, she had thought about him all day; he was just there, constantly, and her T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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thoughts of him were pleasant, almost numbing, like the feeling, she imagined, that an opiate would give. Then, when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of his students, she had thought about him with anxiety and alarm, as one thinks of somebody whom one is afraid to lose. And that had been replaced by resentment and anger and aching feelings of love: emotions that were all inextricably mixed up and which fought with one another in a hopeless lack of resolution. The precise memory of him became less vivid, as a drawing in pencil on paper may blur, become less clearly delineated with handling and folding. But he was still there, and every so often—more often than she would have liked to admit—there came a pang of longing. At such times all she wanted was for him to come back into her life as if nothing had happened, for her to be lying in his arms listening to the song that he liked to play at such moments, the gravelly voiced singer with his mid-Atlantic drawl singing about love and heartache; music that she could not listen to now, because of its associations and the sense of loss that it triggered. We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, our favourite, and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.

Yesterday, and the day before, she had not thought of John Liamor—not once. And she had not thought about him today, either, until that moment when in front of the lawyer’s office in Rutland Square she had thought about his absence from her thoughts. And it was different, she decided. When she thought about him now, he was just another person, not John Liamor, the man who had dominated her life. He was my North, my South—those desolate words of WHA about lost love. And he 1 0 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h went on to say: I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. Well, of course.

I am free of him now, she said to herself. I am a free woman.

I thought that he would last for ever: I was wrong. She went up to the door and pushed it open, thinking: I am free. But then she thought: Why am I free? And she knew intuitively that it was because of what had happened with Jamie. Something had been changed by that moment of contact. Jamie would be her lover. It was John who had been stopping her—not some notion of appropriateness—those were intellectual doubts and it was really far more simple than that. She had been tied to an incu-bus, the memory of a love that had been rejected and had had nowhere to go; she had been locked into a dead relationship and now the last dried skin of it had fallen away, like the scab on a wound, and she was free.

She faced the receptionist, who looked up at her with an enquiring smile. Isabel thought: What if I told this woman, if I said to her, “I have just decided, out there on your doorstep, that I am going to have an affair with a younger man?” And then, presto, had taken a photograph out of her bag and said, “There.

Look at him.”

We do not do these things, and she did not. She had once, in casual conversation about the mind, discussed such impulses with her psychiatrist friend, Richard Latcham, who had said:

“Of course we all have those thoughts. We have them when we stand on the edge of waterfalls. We all think: What if I jumped now? Or we think of saying something outrageous, or taking all our clothes off. It’s entirely natural, but we never do it. It’s the mind exploring possibilities, which is what our subconscious minds do all the time. Most of the possibilities are very straight-T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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forward likelihoods, but there are others, which are set aside and disregarded. Don’t worry, Isabel.”

“But surely it happens,” Isabel had said. “Surely sometimes people give in to these urges. After all, some people actually do jump over waterfalls, and maybe not all of them had thought it all out beforehand.”

Richard thought for a moment. “I think it’s pretty rare,” he said. “But I do know of one case. Somebody I know, in fact. He told me all about it. He’s a classicist here in Cambridge, a tremendously erudite man. He writes about late Latin poetry.

Apparently he’s the man for late Latin poetry. They had a dinner in his college and they were all in the senior common room afterwards—you know, one of those old panelled rooms with portraits of the founder and Isaac Newton and so forth on the walls, and he was sitting with a friend drinking a glass of port when a visiting professor of archaeology from Canada walked past with his wife. They had just helped themselves to coffee and had the cups in their hands. Apparently she was a rather substantial woman who was particularly broad in the beam. And this classicist suddenly said very loudly, in the hearing of everybody, ‘My God! What a massive rump!’ ”

“Apparently this poor professor of archaeology dropped his coffee cup and the coffee spilled down the front of his trousers.

And his wife stood frozen to the spot. That was it. The classicist apologised and said that he did not know what had come over him. He really felt terrible about it. He later wrote them a letter and offered to make a substantial donation to a charity or cause of their choice. They accepted his apology, which is exactly what you would expect of decent people like the Canadians, and then they suggested some association for Anglo-Canadian 1 0 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h understanding, which I suppose was appropriate, in a way. But I think that was one case where the inner urge to do something impermissible overcame the inhibitory mechanisms.” Richard paused. “Mind you, it could have been worse.”

“Hardly,” said Isabel.

“He could have been standing at the edge of a waterfall,”

said Richard thoughtfully. “Or he could have been standing behind her at a waterfall.”

“And pushed her over?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Richard.

“What a—” She was about to say terrible disaster, but Richard said: “Splash.”

T H E R E C E P T I O N I S T I N V I T E D I S A B E L to take a seat. The lawyer, she said, would be down to see her in a few minutes and would see her in the small conference room off the reception area. Isabel sank into a large black leather sofa and paged through a social magazine. It was about cocktail parties and receptions and openings at galleries. The same faces appeared in several of the photographs, faces which looked confidently into the camera as if to say, “Yes, me again.” She turned the pages quickly, and then stopped. A dance had been held at Prestonfield House: somebody’s birthday, the daughter of a man in a kilt with an elaborate ruff at his throat, the full Highland rig, an East Lothian grandee. And there were the bright young people, smiling, laughing, glasses of champagne in their hands.

And there was Jamie standing in a group of three young men, all of them in their kilts and formal jackets, their arms around one another. She stared at the photograph, stared at the faces of the other two young men, and at Jamie, and her heart gave a lurch.

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She was not part of that world. But there was something else about the photograph that intrigued her, something almost homo-erotic in the easy intimacy of the three young men, their friendship, their closeness. She looked closer. Their arms were on one another’s shoulders; the face of one of them was turned to another, facing him. Jamie had pulled back from the kiss that afternoon; could it be that, for all his obsession with Cat, who was, after all, boyish in her appearance, his inclinations, or some of them, were otherwise? That was quite common, and one should not be surprised that a man might be attracted to one or two women but still be attracted to his own sex. There were many such relationships. And a young man like that might find the company of an older woman appealing, because it was easy and interesting and sexually undemanding. She looked at the photograph again, and, in a quick movement, furtively tore it out, folded it and tucked it into her bag. There was a rustling of paper from the desk near the window, and she gave a glance in the direction of the receptionist, who had clearly seen her. She smiled and shrugged, a gesture which came naturally to her but which was ambiguous in its meaning.

“I’m sorry,” Isabel said across the room. “I simply had to keep that. It’s someone I know. And it’s pretty out of date . . .”

“Of course,” said the receptionist politely. “It’s just that we tend to keep the magazines for a while. People like to read them.”

“Good,” said Isabel, meaninglessly, looking up at the ceiling, like a child caught in an act of flagrant disobedience who simply pretends that it has not happened.

The lawyer, an attractive woman in the dark skirt and high-boned looks of her profession, came through the door and shook hands. She gestured to a door and led Isabel into a small, 1 0 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h windowless conference room furnished with a beechwood table and chairs. There was coffee in a vacuum jug and a small plate of biscuits.

As she helped Isabel to coffee, the lawyer explained that although she was happy to talk about the purchase of the flat, any formal offer would have to come through Isabel’s own lawyer in the proper legal form.

“I understand,” said Isabel. “But there was something I wanted to discuss with you personally.”

“I haven’t seen the flat myself,” warned the lawyer. “I have some particulars about it, but I don’t have details. If there is something about it that needs further looking at, then you need to speak to your surveyor. I take it that—”

Isabel interrupted. “It’s nothing to do with that,” she said.

“We had a survey done. Everything was fine. No settlement in the building.”

“Which is very much a plus in the New Town, isn’t it?” said the lawyer. “There are some parts where the floors are at quite an angle. I suppose it’s the penalty you pay for living in an old building. Lots of character, but sometimes lots of cracks.

No, I gather it’s a very nice little flat.” She looked at Isabel enquiringly.

“Simon Mackintosh said that the owner—”

“Florence Macreadie.”

“Yes, I met her. He said that Florence Macreadie was prepared to let me have the flat for substantially under the starting price.”

The lawyer nodded. “It’s unusual. Very unusual. But yes, I can confirm that. Ten thousand below.”

Isabel sipped at her coffee. She looked at the lawyer’s hands, which were resting on a pad of paper, an expensive, lacquered T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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fountain pen held loosely between the fingers. But her hands did not move. They were perfectly still.

“It’s very generous of her,” said Isabel. “But I fear that she has the wrong impression.” She looked at the lawyer, whose eyes moved away from hers. It was embarrassing for her, she decided. This was not a matter of conditions and clauses. “Yes,”

she went on. “She formed the impression that the young man who was with me was there because we were going to move in together. She was . . .”

“Touched,” supplied the lawyer, and smiled at Isabel, as one woman to another. She looked down at her hands and placed the pen very deliberately on the pad of paper. It rolled slightly and then came to rest. Isabel watched it.

“Well, we’re not,” said Isabel. “I asked him to come simply because he knows the area.”

The lawyer was silent for a moment. Then she laughed.

“Ah! So you’re not . . . Well, I suppose one must say that you’re not . . . together. I’m sorry. The way she described it to me made it sound rather romantic. I’m sorry, Miss Dalhousie.”

Isabel looked again at the lawyer’s hands. The wedding ring.

And her mind was made up. She would not be an object of pity.

She would not. “We are actually,” she said.

The lawyer did not understand. “You’re . . .”

“We are in a relationship,” said Isabel.

The lawyer blushed. “Oh . . . I didn’t mean to . . .”

“It’s all right. It’s at an early stage. But we’re not going to live there. That flat will be for someone else altogether. I have a . . .

a lady who helps me. I’m buying it for her.” To say that it was at an early stage was not enough. She should have said that they were close friends, and that was all. But suddenly she was tired of being by herself, tired of being seen by others as being in 1 0 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h some way disadvantaged because she was single, or as incapable of getting herself a man. She was not. She was not. But she knew at the same time she should not make what amounted to a childish boast of a relationship with a younger man. She had no reason to wish to make this other woman feel envious, and yet it had slipped out and now it was difficult to retract it without looking foolish. Leave it, she thought. It’s not important.

Leave it.

The lawyer seemed flustered, but after a moment or two she regained her composure. “But don’t you think that Miss Macreadie’s offer might still stand? I’ll have to ask her, of course, but it seems to me that she might still wish to help you by selling you the flat, even if it’s for your . . . your lady. The way she put it to me was that she wanted to do something for you because she liked the idea of your being with that young man—and she did describe him as a bit younger than you. Not of course that . . .

But the point is, I think she wants you to have it.”

Isabel sat back in her chair. She had not expected this. She had stretched the truth. Jamie was not her lover—yet—and now it seemed as if she might be offered the flat nonetheless. And that would mean that a potential advantage secured on the basis of a misunderstanding would become a potential advantage secured on the basis of a clear lie. So she had made the situation worse.

The lawyer stood up. “Let me speak to her,” she said. “Then I’ll get back to Simon Mackintosh to confirm things. That’s what I’ll do.”

Isabel could not bring herself to object. She knew that she should, but she thought that she might do so later, when she had the time to think of a reasonable way out of a ridiculous misunderstanding. So she said nothing, and was shown out cor-T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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dially by the lawyer. As she left through the front door she saw the receptionist glancing at her. There was disapproval in the glance but it was well concealed; disapproval of one who tore pictures from the magazines of others, which would have been compounded, surely, had she known that this magazine-mutilator was one of those people who boasted of romantic exploits that they simply had not had. Those are the worst sort of people in every way. Inadequate lovers. Inadequate people.

C H A P T E R T E N

E

JAMIE ARRIVED EARLY for dinner, as he often did, since he enjoyed talking to Isabel while she prepared the meal. He would sit at the kitchen table, glass in hand, listening to her; he liked to listen to her. But this was not possible this evening, as it was Mimi’s dinner and she had forbidden Isabel to enter the kitchen.

“Unless I can’t find anything,” she said. “Then you can come in and get it for me. Otherwise, this is my show. You’re off duty.”

As Joe was busy with correspondence in the study, Isabel took Jamie through to the music room and they sat in front of the high Victorian fireplace. During the summer Grace filled the fire basket with dried hibiscus from the garden, and the faded blue-grey petals of the flower heads were covered with little fragments of masonry that had fallen down the flue.

“Somebody told me that my chimneys were crumbling inside,” Isabel said. “And every so often a good chunk of masonry falls down to make the point. But I can’t be bothered to do anything about it. I really can’t. They can reline them, but it’s another expense.”

“But you’re not short of money,” said Jamie. “You can have T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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lined chimneys if you want. You can have anything you want.

Anything.”

Isabel looked at him. She did not like discussing her finances with anybody, even with Jamie, but now she considered what he had said. You can have anything you want. And anyone too? she wondered. The idea was offensive, and she tried to put it out of her mind, but the question was insistent: Could money really get you people, if that was what you wanted? Was it a crude transaction, or were there people who were simply drawn to those with money and therefore prepared to take up with them, even if they would never have done so otherwise? She thought of an aged magnate who had married one of the world’s most glam-orous women. Would she have married him if he had no money?

It was difficult to imagine, but then she thought: I know nothing about that woman, and what she wanted, or saw in him. How do I know that she didn’t love him?

“It’s not that simple,” she said to Jamie. “In the first place, I don’t have that much. And in the second place, I don’t like to waste it.” She did not intend to sound peevish, but she did.

Jamie looked apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“I know,” said Isabel, melting.

“The point is,” said Jamie, “that you shouldn’t let things go with a house. If something needs attending to, then you should do it before it gets worse. My dad’s got a builder who keeps saying that to him.”

“And it’s true,” said Isabel. But then she remembered a conversation with a German friend, Michael von Poser, on one of his visits. He was a prominent German conservationist who believed that old buildings should be left to age gracefully. “And if 1 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h your ceiling should fall down,” he had said to Isabel, a twinkle in his eye, “then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard.

Think of it that way.”

Isabel told Jamie about this remark and they both laughed.

Then Jamie looked up at the ceiling, as if to detect signs of imminent collapse. “What about that flat in St. Stephen Street?”

he asked. “What’s happening about that? Have you put in an offer?”

Isabel did not respond immediately. She looked into her glass of wine. New Zealand white. “Cloudy Bay,” she muttered.

Jamie held his glass up to the light. “And so clear,” he said, smiling. “But the flat—are you going to go for it?”

“Do you think I should?” she asked.

“Of course. If you really want to get a place for Grace, then that seems to me to be perfect. It’s really nice. She’ll love it. And it’s not far for her to toddle up the hill to those spiritualist meetings of hers. Ideal.”

Isabel plucked up her courage. “Something has happened,”

she said cautiously. “Since you ask. My lawyer was in touch. We had noted an interest with her lawyers, and they had contacted us. They said that Florence Macreadie wanted me to have the flat and that she would take an offer, from me, of the asking price . . .” She paused. Then, “Less ten thousand.”

Jamie’s eyes widened. “Ten thousand under? Is she desperate or something? If it goes to bids then somebody’s bound to offer at least ten thousand over. Maybe that’s what she said, and they got it wrong.”

Isabel shook her head. “They didn’t,” she said. “Ten thousand under. There’s a reason.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. She had decided to tell him, but how was T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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she to put it? Although everything had changed for her, he was behaving as if nothing had happened the other day in his flat.

She felt slightly injured by this because it implied a certain indifference on his part, and she wanted to talk to him about it, to see what he had meant. But if she did so, then he might take fright, or he might be embarrassed, or he might . . . There were any number of ways in which he might respond.

She steeled herself. “Apparently Florence Macreadie thought that we were planning to buy the flat together.”

She looked at Jamie. But all he did was shrug and take a sip of wine from his glass. “So?” he said. “I was helping you. I can see why she thought that. People take friends to look at places they’re buying.”

“No,” said Isabel. “You’ve got it wrong. She thought that you and I were going to live in it. Together.”

Isabel was surprised by Jamie’s reaction. He smiled. “As flatmates? Would you do your share of the washing-up, Isabel?”

“As lovers,” she said quietly.

Jamie was silent. Isabel glanced at him, but he did not look at her. “I see,” he said.

“It’s ridiculous,” Isabel said. It was a ridiculous misunderstanding, that is; it was not ridiculous that she and Jamie should be lovers. Not now.

Jamie looked up, and for a moment she saw something in his eyes. She was certain of it. “Is it all that ridiculous?” he said quietly.

“Well, no . . .”

He seemed to be thinking of something for a moment, and she waited anxiously, but then he said, “Have you put in the offer?”

Isabel sighed. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t let her sell it to me 1 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h on the basis that we’re going to live there when we aren’t. It would be wrong. It really would.”

Jamie thought about this for a moment. “No. No you can’t. I can see that—now that I think about it.” He put down his wineglass. “I once bought a bassoon from a man who was drunk,” he said. “He had put an advertisement in the paper saying that he was selling a load of old musical instruments. I went along to his place, and he showed me a room with about seven old instruments in it, all in fairly sick condition. He had bought them, he said, at a garage sale. Some instrument-repair man had died and his family had sold the contents of his workshop. They were his project, but he died before he got round to restoring them.”

“And the man who advertised was drunk?” asked Isabel.

“Yes,” said Jamie. “It was about seven in the evening, and he had been in the pub with his friends. He told me he had. But he must have been there for hours. He was pretty far gone.”

Isabel became the philosopher. “A very nice problem,” she said. “Is a drunken agreement a proper agreement? Very nice. I suppose that drunk people can still know what they want. In fact, sometimes the fact that they’re drunk reveals to them even more clearly what they really want. In vino veritas. ”