The Right Attitude to Rain

Jamie said that this was true, but in this case there was a complication. “There was a bassoon on the ground. I recognised the model immediately. Quite a nice one. It needed a bit of work, but it would make a very nice instrument. So I asked him what he wanted for it, and he said, ‘That clarinet?’ and he quoted a really low price.”

Isabel laughed. “So you bought it as a clarinet?”

Jamie looked for a moment as if he was ashamed. “I’m afraid I did.”

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Isabel wanted to reassure him. Those who entered the market did so at their peril; it was caveat venditor as well as caveat emptor. But what was the difference between buying an antique from an elderly person who was unaware of its value—which she was sure was not right—and buying something from an ignorant drunk? There was really no difference except for the fact that we felt sympathy for the vulnerable and we did not for the drunk. But that was not enough to make a moral difference.

That was the problem with morality; it required a consistency and evenhandedness that most of us simply did not possess.

Or some schools of morality required that; and the more she thought about it, the more Isabel came to believe that such requirements were simply inhuman. That was not the way we worked as human beings. We were weak, inconsistent beings, and we needed to be judged as such.

Jamie looked at his watch. “They should be arriving soon,”

he said. “Tell me something about them. Tell me who these people are.”

Isabel also looked at the time. The moment, she realised, had been lost. They had skated round the issue, but at least she had seen something in his eyes and he had implied that it was not ridiculous that they should be more than friends. So now she knew that, and that was something.

“ TO M B R UC E .”

Isabel took the hand that was extended to her. It was a firm handshake, of the sort that Americans give, a token of direct-ness and no nonsense.

“And this,” he said, “is Angie.”

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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 was in the hall, with Mimi and the guests. She turned to Angie, noting the low-cut cocktail dress and patent-leather shoes. “We’ve actually met,” said Isabel. “I’m sure that you won’t remember, but it was in a gallery in Dundas Street, a week or so ago. We spoke . . .”

“Of course!” Angie smiled. “Of course I remember.” She turned to Tom. “We were buying that picture by . . . What’s his name again, hon?”

Tom looked flustered. “Cal . . . Cal . . .” His words were distorted by the twisting of his mouth.

“Cadell?” suggested Isabel.

Tom looked at Isabel with gratitude. “Yes, that’s him.”

“One of our most distinguished painters,” said Isabel. “My father had one of his paintings, but gave it away. That was before they became so expensive. I’ve often wondered whether I could ask for it back.”

“Tom adores Scottish art,” said Angie. “In fact, anything to do with your country. He’s Scottish, of course. That name.

Bruce. Descended from Robert the Bruce.”

Tom’s embarrassment was palpable. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “It’s a possibility that we’re looking into. I’ve got somebody doing the research and he says that there are interesting things coming up. He thinks that it might be the same family. But I’m sure it’s only a remote possibility. We’re east Texas really.”

“But if it were true,” said Isabel, “that’s a royal connection.

Think of that. Of course, the Scottish throne has gone south now, with the Hanoverians. Some people still resent that, you know.” She led them into the drawing room, where Jamie was waiting, talking to Joe. Introductions were made while Isabel poured drinks for Tom and Angie.

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“Talking of Scottish kingship,” said Isabel as she handed Tom a glass of wine, “Jamie here has Jacobite sympathies.”

Tom and Angie turned to look at Jamie. Isabel noticed that while Tom turned away, Angie continued to look at him, as one watching. Jamie raised a hand in protest. “Not really.”

“Well, I suspect that he has,” said Isabel. “He seems to know a bit about the Stuarts and he sings Jacobite songs.”

“You don’t always believe in what you sing,” Jamie said, looking to Joe for support.

“No,” said Joe.

“Sometimes lost causes have all the best songs,” said Isabel.

“And the best poetry too. Look at the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans had all the poetry. Lorca, for instance.”

“Who are the Jacobites?” asked Angie, turning to face Tom.

“Followers of the Stuart kings,” said Isabel. “Jacobus is James in Latin, and a lot of the Stuart kings were called James.

Bonnie Prince Charlie was a Stuart.”

Tom tapped Angie on the shoulder. “The house we’re staying in, my dear. Remember, I told you that it was associated with the Jacobite cause. And there’s that bedroom . . .”

Angie brightened. “Oh yes! The Prince’s bedroom.”

Tom took the explanation further. “Legend has it that Prince Charlie stayed in it at some point. Just one night, apparently, and then he had to move on.” He looked at Joe. “We thought that we might put you and Mimi in it when you come out there.”

“As long as you don’t mind a ghost,” said Angie, giggling.

“I thought I saw him the other day. He was sort of white—

insubstantial . . .” She trailed off, and then suddenly turned to Jamie. “Do you believe in ghosts, Jamie?”

Jamie laughed nervously. “I haven’t thought about it very 1 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h much . . . But, no, probably not. I haven’t seen any evidence. Or any ghosts, for that matter.”

“Grace is the person,” said Isabel, glancing at Jamie. “My housekeeper. She doesn’t call them ghosts, of course. She’s a spiritualist. She talks about ‘the other side.’ ” She felt vaguely disloyal, talking about Grace in this way, and her voice dropped at the end. It was true, though, Grace did go to seances, which had always struck her as being so out of character, given Grace’s good sense in everything else. We all have our weak points, she thought. Mine . . . This was no time for self-evaluation, though; she would change the subject of the conversation, she decided.

But then she remembered Mobile, which was said to be the city of ghosts. That had always amused her. “Mobile is the place for ghosts, isn’t it?” she volunteered.

Mimi looked up. “So we’re told,” she said. “Though why there should be more ghosts there than anywhere else, I don’t know.”

“Perhaps they move down from the North,” Joe observed drily. “People move to Florida in their retirement. Ghosts move to Mobile.”

It was typical of Joe’s dry humour, and Isabel looked at him in appreciation. Angie, however, seemed puzzled. “Do ghosts move?” she asked.

“That’s something we can’t tell,” answered Isabel. She turned to Tom. It was kind of him and Angie to issue the invitation for the house party, and she thanked him. On the contrary, he said: it was good of Isabel and her friends to fill the house for them.

They were spending almost three months in Scotland and knew very few people. It would be pleasant to have some company.

You have each other, thought Isabel. But was that enough?

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Even when one was in love, it was not really enough just to have the other person—not if one needed stimulation. The company of just one person could be reassuring, could stave off loneli-ness, but would it be enough for three months?

Angie had been talking to Joe and Jamie, and so she said to Tom, “We need to see people, don’t we? I sometimes have to get out of the house just to do so—not necessarily to talk to anyone, just to see them. We have some shops nearby. I drive round there and have a coffee. See people.”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess that’s why we come into Edinburgh a lot. I thought that we might just stay out in that house, buried in the country, but we need to get in.”

Isabel nodded. She could imagine what it would be like to be stuck in the country with Angie. But then she had no interest in Angie, and he did. He must find her exciting. Sexually?

Strange.

She stole a glance at Tom. What would his face have looked like before the Bell’s palsy? He must have been good-looking, with those strong features, the regular nose, the fine eyes; only the mouth was wrong, twisted into its grimace by the condition.

And his physique was impressive too. He must be in his fifties, but there was no spare flesh and he was well put together. If one looked beyond the grimace, one saw a fine man; as Angie must have done, unless she was looking at something else: at the house in Preston Hollow, at the staff who presumably looked after him—the Mexican maid, the groundsman, the driver.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Tom asking her what she did. Isabel explained about the Review and he listened attentively. He had done several courses in philosophy at Dartmouth, he said. They discussed that for a while and then Mimi caught 1 1 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel’s eye and pointed in the direction of the kitchen. It was time for dinner.

Isabel had left the seating plan to Mimi, and she found herself next to Tom; Jamie, across the table, was on Angie’s right.

Isabel watched as the evening wore on. Each time she looked across, she noticed that Angie was deep in conversation with Jamie and she heard odd snatches of what she said. Tom’s been so kind to me . . . We toyed with the idea of Paris, but Tom’s so interested in Scotland . . . You don’t know Dallas? You should . . .

some time . . . And then, would you believe it, she shot him. Everybody knew it wasn’t an accident, I certainly knew . . .

Why, Isabel wondered, had she shot him? And who was she? Women shot abusive husbands, in desperation, or husbands who went off with other women, in fury. It seemed unlikely, but she was talking about Texas, where guns, shamefully, were part of the culture. And that was an absurdity, she thought, and such a blot on American society, this little-boy fascination with guns and toughness. Something had gone so badly wrong.

The dinner finished reasonably early, as Tom and Angie had to drive back to the house outside Peebles where they were staying. In the hall outside, Angie said, “Now, Jamie. Everybody here is coming out to see us in a week’s time. They can’t leave you here in Edinburgh. Will you be our guest too?”

Tom looked up. He was slightly surprised, thought Isabel.

“Yes, why not?” he said. “It would be very pleasant. There’s plenty of room.”

Jamie looked uncertain. He glanced at Isabel, who smiled at him. “It would make the party,” she said.

“Thank you. I’d love that.”

After they had left, Isabel insisted that she and Jamie would 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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clear up as Mimi had prepared the meal. In the kitchen with Jamie, she closed the door behind her. “Well,” she said.

Jamie’s expression was passive.

“Well,” said Isabel again. “That was Tom and Angie.”

“Yes,” said Jamie, putting a plate into the dishwasher.

“That was.”

Isabel reached past him to put a couple of glasses on the top rack of the machine. “You seemed to get on well enough with her.” She picked up another glass and threw out the dregs. “I couldn’t help but hear something she said. Something about some woman shooting a man. What was that about?”

Jamie shrugged. “Some Dallas story,” he said. “Somebody who married somebody else. Some oil man. Then shot him. So she said.”

“Shot for his oil,” mused Isabel. “Tom had better be careful.”

For a moment Jamie said nothing. He stacked a few more plates and then turned to face Isabel. “Isabel,” he said, softly.

For a minute, Isabel thought that he was going to embrace her. It was the right moment; they were alone; he was standing close to her. Her heart raced in anticipation. But then she saw that he was shaking a finger at her in mock admonition.

“You have an overactive imagination,” Jamie said.

She turned away. She was tired, and he was right. Her imagination was overactive—in every respect. She imagined that people might dispose of one another for gain. She imagined that this young man, who could presumably have any girl who took his fancy, would choose to get involved with her, a woman in her early forties. She should rein in her imagination and become realistic, like everybody else. And you don’t need the complica-tions that would follow any deeper involvement with Jamie; that 1 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h is what she said to herself. Why spoil a friendship for the sake of the carnal? And the carnal inevitably spoiled friendships. It took friends to another land—away from their innocence, to a place from which they could not return to simple friendship.

And yet, remember, she thought, none of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do.

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

E

THE FOLLOWING MORNING she made the decision to visit Florence Macreadie. There was an F. Macreadie listed in the telephone directory for St. Stephen Street and a quick call from Isabel established that she would be at home after eleven that morning—“after doing the messages”—and would be happy to see her; Isabel approved of the old Scots expression and liked Florence Macreadie all the more for using it. One did not go shopping in Scots; one went for messages.

She made her way to Stockbridge slowly, walking across the Meadows and down Howe Street, stopping to look into shop windows, and to think. While looking at a display of Eastern rugs in Howe Street, marked down in price, now irresistible according to a placard in the window, Turkish delight, in fact, she reflected on the fact that when she had last walked past this shop, a week ago, and had briefly glanced at the rugs in the window, she had been a different person. She had been Isabel Dalhousie, of course, the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics and resident of Merchiston; those aspects of identity, the externals, had not changed, but others had. A week ago, she had believed in the saintliness—whatever that was—of her mother; now she 1 2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was a person who knew that there were no saints and that her mother had been a woman with human failings, and a younger lover. And a week ago she had believed in her own ability to resist temptation; now she knew that she, like everybody else, was too weak to do that. Two sets of scales, she thought, had fallen from her eyes. It was rather like growing up; the same process of seeing things differently and feeling different inside.

Mimi’s disclosure of her mother’s affair had raised conflict-ing emotions in Isabel. She had even felt cross with Mimi, in a shoot-the-messenger sense, but these feelings had not lasted long. She knew that she had given Mimi no alternative but to disclose what she knew, and indeed if anybody deserved censure for that it was Isabel herself. Ordinary consideration for the autonomy of others dictates that we should not browbeat information out of those who don’t want to give it. What we know, and what we think, is our own business until we decide to impart it to others. Secrecy about the self may seem ridiculous or unjustified, but it is something that we can choose if we so desire. And this is true even if the information is something of very little significance. Isabel had read of an author of naval histories who had considered questions from journalists as to his date of birth to be unpardonably intrusive. That had struck her as being absurd—unless he was unduly sensitive about his age, which might have been the case, as that particular author had invented an entirely fictional boyhood in Ireland for himself. In which case, one might learn to be wary of those who did not offer their age: had they invented a past?

It had been wrong, she felt, to press Mimi to tell her. The information she had elicited had not been all that unusual—

there were plenty of adulterous mothers—but what had shocked Isabel was that it showed that her mother had been just like she 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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was. That was the information that she had found difficult and had led to several nights of sleeplessness. Her mother had had an affair with a much younger man, which was precisely what Isabel wanted to do. I am like my mother in that respect. It comes from somewhere, and that is where. And somehow the thought that an ingrained biological drama was playing itself out in the next generation made her friendship with Jamie something less individual, less personal. This was not something which had arrived as a gift; it was simply tawdry behaviourism.

She moved away from the rug shop. A man inside, anxiously waiting for customers, had seen her and had been watching her. Isabel had looked through the glass, beyond the piles of rugs, and had met his gaze. She was sensitive to such encounters, because in her mind they were not entirely casual. By looking into the eyes of another, one established a form of connection that had moral implications. To look at another thus was to acknowledge one’s shared humanity with him, and that meant one owed him something, no matter how small that thing might be. That was why the executioner was traditionally spared the duty of looking into the eyes of the condemned; he observed him by stealth, approached from behind, was allowed a mask, and so on. If he looked into the eyes, then the moral bond would be established, and that moral bond would prevent him from doing what the state required: the carrying out of its act of murder.

Of course that was a long way from looking through the plate-glass window of a rug shop, but salesmen knew full well that once you engaged your customer in that personal bond, then the chances of their feeling obliged to buy were all the greater. Rug salesmen in Istanbul in particular understood that; their little cups of coffee, half liquid, half sludge, offered on a 1 2 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h brass tray, were intended not only as gestures of traditional hospitality, but also as the constituents of a bond between vendor and client. So, as Isabel retreated from the window and looked fixedly down the street, she felt the tentative bonds snapping like overstretched rubber bands. And then she was free, looking down the road towards St. Stephen Street, and only five minutes early for her meeting with Florence Macreadie.

Florence had returned only a short while before Isabel knocked at her door. Isabel noticed the coat that she was wearing, a dark-blue macintosh that was beginning to fray around the cuffs. Yet its cut was good and it had in its day been fashionable, or at least in good taste.

“I’ve just come back,” she said. “I haven’t had time to make coffee or anything.”

“I gave you very little warning,” said Isabel apologetically.

Florence gave a dismissive gesture. “Oh, I don’t stand on ceremony,” she said. “Anybody can come to see me any time.

Not that they do, of course. But they could if they wanted.”

She led Isabel through the hall and into the kitchen. The house was slightly untidier, Isabel thought, than it had been when she had been there last. But that had been during a viewing time, when everything was on show. One had to be tidy, the estate agents advised; and ideally there should be the smell of newly baked bread when prospective purchasers came in—it made them feel positive about the place.

Florence began to spoon coffee into a cafetière. If the smell of newly baked bread was lacking, at least there was the aroma of fresh coffee grounds, as rich and tantalising. She shifted a pile of papers from one side of the table to the other. “I need to sort everything out,” she said. “But I keep putting it off. One 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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accumulates so much stuff in a place and yet it’s hard to throw it away. Or at least I find it hard. It’s like throwing away one’s past.”

Isabel glanced at the papers. They did not look like personal letters, but were old bills, letters from tradesmen, circulars. “Sometimes it’s good to do that,” she said. “It can be quite cathartic to get rid of everything.”

Florence sighed. “And yet, don’t you think that these little scraps of this and that make up our lives? Everything has its associations, painful or otherwise.” She paused, looking at Isabel with eyes that Isabel now saw were an unusual flecked grey.

“You know, when I was teaching—I was an English teacher, by the way—I used to keep the essays of some of my pupils. I still have them. I found that I simply could not throw them away. I kept them as a reminder of the young people who had written them. It’s so sad.”

“Why? Why is it sad?”

“As a teacher, you know, you frequently become very emotionally attached to the young people you see every day. How could it be otherwise? You get to love them, you know, and you miss them terribly when they go off and start their own lives.

Suddenly everything changes. You’ve been a major part of their lives for so long, and then suddenly they no longer need you. I always found that very sad.”

She finished talking and looked at Isabel, as if judging her response. Isabel realised that Florence was assessing her, as some people do when they are not sure whether the person to whom they are talking either understands or is prepared for a conversation of depth.

“I can understand that,” said Isabel. “Yes.”

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

“I think it was the hardest thing about the job,” Florence said. “Saying goodbye to those young people. Although I suppose there were harder things from time to time.” She was silent, lost in memory. Then, “I had a very promising pupil,” she went on. “He was a very nice boy. But he had one of those childhood cancers, and although they tried all sorts of treatments they knew that it was a losing battle. He just wanted to get on with life and do the same things as everybody else did. Go to parties. Play sports. And he did, by and large.”

Isabel said nothing. In the background, the kettle hissed and switched itself off. Florence left it.

“He knew what the score was,” said Florence. “But he didn’t talk about it. And we respected that. I remember when he left school. I wished him good luck and I tried not to cry but, my goodness, when he walked out that door, I dissolved in tears. I remember him standing there and smiling, and I wished him the best of luck with his career. He had his plans for university, you see. I know we all tried, but I don’t think any of us was particularly good at dealing with it. Except for the chaplain.” She stopped and looked at Isabel before continuing. “I don’t know why I’m burdening you with this.”

“It’s not a burden,” said Isabel. “Really, it isn’t.”

“I came into a classroom one afternoon, to fetch something I’d left behind. I didn’t think there was anybody there. But then I saw the chaplain sitting with this boy, and he had his arm around his shoulder, to comfort him, and he was talking to him.

And I could see that the boy had been crying. I closed the door quietly. I don’t think they saw me.

“I can’t believe in God, Miss Dalhousie. I’ve tried from time to time and I just can’t. And yet, when we need them, who are 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 people who are always there for us? Who are the people who comfort us? Whom would you like to have at your ending? What kind of person would you like to have at your deathbed? An atheist or somebody with faith?”

Isabel thought. Were there not atheists who were just as capable of giving love and support as others? And might not it be better to die in doubt, if that had been one’s condition in life?

“I know some very sympathetic non-believers,” she said. “I don’t think we should discount them.”

“Maybe,” said Florence. “But there’s nothing in the atheist’s creed that says that he must love others, is there?”

Isabel could not let this pass. “But he may have every reason! Even if you do not believe in God you may still think it very important to act towards others with generosity and consideration. That’s what morality is all about.”

Florence’s eyes lit up. “Yes,” she said, “morality—the ordinary variety—says that you shouldn’t do anything to hurt others.

But I’m not so sure that it tells you to go further, to love them.”

She thought for a moment. “And surely most people are not going to make the effort to love others on the basis of some theory, are they? I know that I wouldn’t. We have to learn these things. We have to have them drummed into us.”

“The moral habits of the heart,” mused Isabel.

“Yes,” said Florence. “And religion is rather good at doing that, don’t you think?” She turned round and began to pour the hot water into the cafetière. “Anyway, I don’t know how we got into that! You didn’t come here to discuss theology with me, did you?”

Isabel laughed. “Not exactly, although I’m always very happy to talk about such things. I came—”

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

“About the flat.”

“Yes.”

Florence began to pour Isabel a cup of coffee. “I assume that your lawyer has been in touch about my offer?”

Isabel nodded. “He has. It is . . . it is very generous of you.”

Florence sat down at the table, opposite Isabel. She placed both hands around her mug of coffee, warming them. “I’ve had so many people looking round the flat since it went on the market. Thirty, I’d say.”

Isabel said that she could imagine the disruption.

“Of course, some of them haven’t the slightest intention of buying it,” said Florence, smiling. “Do you know that there’s a type of person who goes to look at houses for sale? They have a good poke round and it’s all sheer nosiness. They look in cupboards. They remark on the decor. And so on. I was warned about these people, and I think that I spotted one or two of them. There was one woman from Clarence Street, round the corner, who didn’t realise that I recognised her. She just wanted to see what the inside of my house was like.”

Isabel tried to imagine what it would be like to have that little to do, and to have the brass neck to nose round other people’s houses. But then she thought: What about that house at the end of the road? She had always wanted to see the inside of that. If it were to come on the market, could she resist?

“I assure you,” she said lightly, “I assure you that I was seriously interested.”

Florence laughed. “Of course you were. I didn’t think otherwise. Not for a moment. I could tell.”

Isabel cleared her throat. “I feel that I should tell you something,” she began. “When I came the other day—”

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Florence raised a hand. “Please,” she said. “It was not for me to say what I said to my lawyer. I’ve felt a little bit embarrassed about that. And now she tells me that you and . . . and that young man are not intending to live here after all.”

“No,” said Isabel. “We aren’t.”

“But that doesn’t really make any difference,” said Florence.

“My offer stands. You can still have it for the figure I suggested.”

She paused, taking a sip of coffee from her mug. Isabel saw that she was looking at her over the rim. The look was that of a schoolteacher observing a favourite pupil who has perhaps just a touch too much character: a mixture of approbation and envy.

“May I ask why you want me to have it?” Isabel asked. “I hope that I don’t sound rude, but I really would like to know.”

Florence put down her mug. “Because I like you, Miss Dalhousie,” she said. “That’s one reason. I just do.”

Isabel shook her head. “But you hardly know me. I really don’t see how you can come to any conclusions about me on the basis of . . . on the basis of not much more than one meeting.

And, anyway, your idea of my circumstances is, I’m afraid, wrong. That young man—”

“Is just a friend. Oh, I imagined that might be the case.

After the lawyer came back to me and said that you had been to see her. She said that . . . Well, I’m sorry to have to say this. She said that she didn’t believe what you told her—that you were, in fact, having an affair with that young man.”

It is not easy to hear the news that we have been spotted in our lies, and Isabel’s reaction, a simple human reaction, was to blush. This was burning shame, made physical, and Florence, seeing it, immediately regretted having said what she had.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you that. I made 1 3 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h it sound more serious than it was. And I’m sure that she mis-understood what you said. I’m sure that you didn’t deliberately mislead her.”

“I did,” said Isabel plainly. “I told her that Jamie and I were in a relationship. Those were my exact words.”

“Well . . .”

“I don’t know exactly why I did it,” said Isabel. “Pride, probably. Perhaps I was just fed up with being condescended to by married people. You know how it can be sometimes.”

Florence reached across and placed her hand on Isabel’s arm. “I’m single,” she said. “I know what you’re talking about.”

Isabel looked down at the design of the waxed tablecloth on the table. It looked French: a series of little pictures of a cornucopia disgorging its contents before a group of surprised picnickers: Déjeuner sur l’herbe transformed.

“It’s so ridiculous,” said Isabel. “A week ago my life was all very straightforward. Now it seems that I’ve talked myself into a whole web of misunderstandings and deceptions. All over nothing.”

Florence laughed, and her laughter defused the tension.

“Let’s forget about all that,” she said. “The point is this: I gather you’re buying this place for somebody who works for you. That’s reason enough for me to want to sell it to you.”

Isabel protested, but Florence was insistent. “If you could have seen some of the people who have been through this place since it’s been on the market, you’d understand how I feel.

Some of them were nice enough, but an awful lot of them were ghastly, just ghastly. Materialistic. Ill-mannered. And quite a few of them actually condescended to me. They thought, woman in her sixties. Very uninteresting. Unimportant. Practically non-existent. And then there was you, and that young man. And 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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suddenly thought, Why should I sell this to somebody I don’t like? I don’t need the money. I’m comfortably off, with my teaching pension and the money and that house in Trinity left to me.

I don’t need anything more.”

She stopped to take a sip of her coffee. On the other side of the table, Isabel stared out of the window and thought about what Florence had said. She could see the logic of the decision and she knew that she should accept; to be able to accept is as important as to be able to give—she knew that.

“You’re being very generous,” she said. Then she hesitated, but just for a few moments, before she continued. “I can afford to pay more, you know. I’m not short of money.”

She felt the soft power of Florence’s gaze; those grey, understanding eyes. “I know that.”

But how did she know? thought Isabel. Do I seem well-off?

There is a well-off look, Isabel thought, but she did not imagine she had it. It was an assuredness that came with not being anxious; that and a well-tended air. But how did one distinguish between that and arrogance?

“Let’s leave it at that,” Florence suggested. “You can sleep on my offer and then, in, let’s say, two days, your lawyer can let us know whether you want to go ahead. Would you be happy with that?”

Isabel made a gesture with her hands, palms outwards, which indicated acceptance, and resignation too. Florence, smiling, reached for the cafetière to top up Isabel’s mug. “That young man,” she said. “You’re lucky to have such a friend.”

“Very,” said Isabel.

“You’re obviously fond of him,” said Florence, and then added, “And he of you, of course.”

Isabel again said, “Very.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Florence put down her mug, exactly over one of the cornucopias. The picnickers, frozen in time, were dwarfed. “Could it not become a love affair?” she said quietly. She watched Isabel’s face as she spoke, and her words were hesitant, as if ready for withdrawal in the face of a hostile reaction. But Isabel was not offended by the question.

“It’s almost that,” she said. “I think we’re at a crossroads now. But I just don’t know.”

“But you should,” said Florence. “Look at yourself. You’re still quite young. You’re not my age. If he wants it too, then why deny yourselves?”

It’s not as simple as that, thought Isabel. There was the question of friendship and the hazardous conversion of friendship into erotic love. That was not always simple. “I can’t help myself,”

she said. “I keep thinking through the implications of things. I know that it’s a guaranteed way of never getting anything done, but it’s just the way I am. I don’t act spontaneously.”

“Then be prepared,” said Florence abruptly. “Be prepared to shed tears when you get to my age and you think back on lost opportunities. Somebody asked me to live with . . .”—there was the briefest hesitation, and then—“with her. I said no, because people would talk. They wouldn’t now, of course, but it was different then. They didn’t care about people’s happiness, did they? And I think that we would have been very happy together.

Just as friends, you know. Just as friends. She had a flat in the Dean Village, you know, under the bridge, looking out onto the mill pond. It would have been like living on an opera set. We would have been happy.”

“We shouldn’t care so much about disapproval,” said Isabel.

“But we do, don’t we?”

Florence was looking down at the floor. There was regret in 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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her expression. She looked up at Isabel. “Go on,” she said. “Go ahead. Have an affair with him.”

“And if it goes wrong?”

“That’s the last thing one thinks of on starting these things,”

said Florence. “Really, it must be. Otherwise . . .”

“Maybe.”

There was silence. Isabel had reached a decision, but she did not want to tell Florence what it was. The conversation had been an intimate one, with revelations on both sides, and she had a natural caution. She had not come here to talk about herself and her feelings and she had been slightly surprised by the way in which the other woman had encouraged her. Was it just because she had a romantic streak? There were people who were forever trying to bring others together; it appealed to them to have the world paired off, as if this brought resolution of some sort. But she did not imagine that Florence would think that way. In which case, was she obtaining some almost voyeuristic pleasure from encouraging the affair? Again, some people derived something of that nature from the contemplation of the affairs of others, which was not surprising, thought Isabel, because much of our lives are spent in thinking about what others are doing, watching them, emulating them.

“I really must go,” she said, rising to her feet.

Florence did not get up. “I’ve offended you, haven’t I?” she said. “This is none of my business.”

Isabel shook her head in denial. “You haven’t offended me at all. You’ve made me think. That’s all.”

As she made her way down the stone staircase to the front door, Isabel encountered the cat she had seen on her first visit to Florence’s flat. He was sitting on a chair on a landing, his tail hanging down beneath the seat. He watched her warily as she 1 3 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h walked past, looking up at her, holding her gaze for a moment, before he turned his head away to stare at the banisters with affected interest in something invisible to a human being. Then he closed his eyes, as if to dismiss her, and she walked quietly on. Many people in pursuit of the cool, thought Isabel, would give anything to appear as indifferent, as insouciant, as this indo-lent cat, but they would never make it. Wrong species: we are too engaged, too susceptible to emotion, too far from the con-summate psychopathy of cats.

C H A P T E R T W E L V E

E

THE WEEKEND with Tom and Angie was still some days away. Isabel was looking forward to getting out of town—she had not been anywhere that summer, because June, and the better weather it brought, had crept up on her unannounced.

She wanted to go to Italy for a couple of weeks, or to Istanbul, but had done nothing about organising a trip. Perhaps September or October would be better, when the heat had abated and there would be fewer people about, and perhaps . . . No, Jamie would not be able to come then, as it was term-time, and there would be his bassoon pupils to think about. So perhaps she should suggest just a short trip, a three-day weekend, to one of the Scottish islands, to Harris, perhaps, to that landscape of grass and granite outcrops and Atlantic skies. Jamie might fish on one of the lochs, and she would walk out along that strip of land where the sea broke in waves of cold green water and where one could just imagine those early Scottish saints, their skirts wet, coming in on their small boats from Ireland.

But there was no point in thinking about that now. She had to contend with the preparation of the next issue of the journal and with a number of objections raised to her editing by one of 1 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h her contributors. He was a professor of moral philosophy from Germany who prided himself on his ability to write in English.

This pride was well placed in some respects, but not in others.

Isabel had tried to tell him that inversions in English had to be handled carefully—otherwise infelicities of style would we encounter. The verb at the end of the sentence could be put, but only rarely. Very seriously must the issue of moral imagination be taken, he had written, and when Isabel had interfered with this sentence in the proofs he had responded testily: Wrong it might be, he had written, but wrong here it is not. That very sentence was technically correct, but was not easy modern English, as she had pointed out in a subsequent note, to which he had replied: Must philosophy be easy? For whom are we writing? For the philosopher or the street person? She smiled at the additional confusion; the man in the street was not a street person, by definition.

Grace came in, bearing a cup of coffee. “You look harassed,”

she said, placing the cup and saucer before Isabel. “I thought that you might need this.”

“I certainly do,” said Isabel. “And, Grace, how about this?

What do you understand by street person?”

Grace frowned. “Street person? Oh, we see them all right.

Have you walked down by the bottom of the Playfair Steps recently? You see street persons down there, if that’s what you want to call them.”

“Beggars?”

Grace looked disapproving. “Some of them. But some do other things. Deal in drugs.”

“And use them.”

Grace nodded. “But it’s the beggars that get me. Beggars used to be old and crabbit, remember? There was that man 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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whom everybody called the Glasgow Road Tramp. He was a great character. He wore an old army helmet and used to say to everybody that he had just come in off the Glasgow Road and could one spare him the price of a cup of tea.”

Isabel smiled as she remembered him. He was a much-loved character in the city and everybody gave him money. But he was, of course, a genuine tramp, with boots stuffed with newspapers and a determined walk. Surely it was of the essence of a tramp that he should actually tramp; just as Shakers shook and whirling dervishes whirled.

“But these new beggars,” Grace went on. “They’re nineteen, twenty, or thereabouts. And they just sit there and ask for money. I never give them anything. Never. They could work.

There’s no real unemployment in this city, after all. Everywhere you go you see signs offering work. Just about every café has one. Dishwashers and so on.”

Isabel listened politely. What Grace said was true, but only to an extent. Some of these street people were genuinely homeless—young people in flight from their homes in Dun-fermline or Airdrie or somewhere, running away from abuse or tyranny, or sheer disorder. And they ended up on the street because they had no skills and it was easy.

“I don’t give them any money,” said Isabel quietly. “But sometimes I feel bad about that.”

Grace snorted. “And why should you feel bad? Why should you feel bad when you know what they’re going to do with it?”

Isabel did not answer Grace’s question. The street people at the bottom of the Playfair Steps were a difficult case to defend, even if they deserved defending. She was thinking, instead, of India and of a ride from a hotel to the airport, in that chaotic Indian traffic, which has a choreography and a hedging divinity 1 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of its own, where cows and people and smoke-belching vehicles engage in a ballet that against all the odds seems to work.

And she remembered, in the midst of her terror of collision, a woman running up to the white Ambassador car, her baby, a tiny scrap of humanity, in a dirty sling of rags on her hip, and clawing at the car window with a hand that was some sort of human claw; leprosy, perhaps, had done its work. And she had looked at the woman in horror, because that was what she felt and in the suddenness of the moment could not conceal. And then she had averted her eyes, as the woman trotted beside the slowly moving car, still scraping at the glass in desperate pleading. It had seemed to her that all of suffering humanity was outside that car door, all of it, and that if the car stopped it would sink and she would be consumed by it. Later still, in her airplane seat, with all the resources of jet fuel and technology to lift her out of teeming Bombay, she had thought of that poor woman and of the fact that she would be hungry, right now, unable to feed that tiny baby, and had she opened the window just a little and thrown out a few rupees she would have made life bearable for that woman for at least a couple of days. But she had not.

Begging, she realised, was one of those moral issues which she called intimate; they did not arise in the halls of academia so much as in the daily lives of people. These were the questions that reminded us we had a moral faculty, a conscience: What do we owe our friends? Do I need to be kinder? Am I being selfish?

Should I declare even that to the taxman? And to most of us, this was what moral philosophy was all about.

She looked at Grace, who was still expecting an answer to the question she had posed. “Well, all right,” said Isabel. “Perhaps I don’t need to feel bad about it. But you know how I tend 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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to think about these things too much. I know it’s a failing, but I can’t seem to help myself.”

Grace, who did not respond immediately, was studying Isabel carefully. She knew her employer well; rather better, in fact, than Isabel realised. And although she agreed with Isabel’s self-assessment of her tendency to conduct internal debates when others would simply make a decision and act, she was not sure that this was always a failing. Isabel talked about the good life and how we should try to lead it, and again Grace agreed with this. Isabel’s life was a good one; she was a kind woman, and she felt for people, which was more than one could say about a lot of people in her position, Grace thought. But there were certainly areas of Isabel’s life where what was required was a little less thought and a bit more action. Should she say something? Well, they had always spoken frankly to one another . . .

“Yes,” said Grace. “I know how you think about things. But there are some things that you shouldn’t think too much about.

You just need to say to yourself: Here goes, and get on with it.”

“Work, for instance,” said Isabel, pointing to the pile of papers on her table.

Grace made a dismissive gesture towards the papers: there was always the wastepaper bin for those. No, and here she pointed to her heart; no, it was not work she was thinking about.

“That boy,” she said.

Isabel was perfectly still, as one confronted in misdeed.

Only her eyes moved. “Jamie?”

“Yes, Jamie. You’re in love with one another, aren’t you?”

Isabel was at a loss as to what to say. It was not just her surprise at the fact that Grace had raised the subject; nor was it so much that Grace had detected feelings which she had no idea 1 4 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had been so obvious; it was the fact that she had said in love with one another. Her voice was small. “Do you think that he’s . . . that that’s how he feels?” And she added, in confirmation, because now there could be no concealing this from Grace, “Too?”

Grace did not hesitate. “Of course he does. He worships the ground you walk upon. It’s obvious.”

Isabel, who had been tense with anxiety, now relaxed. She felt gratitude to Grace, a warm feeling of having been told something that she really wanted to hear but had not dared hope for. Yet what did Grace think about it? She had not actually said that she approved, but neither had her attitude been one of manifest disapproval. “Do you think I should . . . do something?”

“He’ll never take the first step,” said Grace quickly. “He’s younger than you, remember.”

How could she forget that? That, after all, was the entire problem. But then, as if anticipating Isabel, Grace went on,

“Not that age matters. Not these days.”

“You don’t think it does?”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Grace. “There’s somebody who comes to the meetings—at the Psychic Institute—who has a much younger husband. At first, I thought he was her son. In fact, somebody said that at one of the meetings, but she simply laughed. No, that’s not the problem.”

Isabel waited for Grace to go on. If the age difference was not the barrier, what was?

“Cat,” said Grace, frowning. “That’s the problem.”

“But I think that he’s getting over her,” said Isabel. “I think he realises now that she’s never going to come back to him. It’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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taken a long enough time, but I think that the penny has finally dropped. I’m sure it has.”

That was not what Grace had had in mind. “Oh, it’s not him that I’m worried about,” she said. “It’s her. If she finds out that you and Jamie are . . . are together, then she’s going to be furious.”

This struck Isabel as being, apart from anything else, unfair.

“But she’s rejected Jamie. She’s made it very clear that she’s not in love with him and never will be. I can’t understand that, of course, but that’s how she feels. Why should she have any interest in what he does now?”

Grace looked at Isabel and thought: You may be a philosopher, but you sometimes don’t understand at all. “Because you’re her aunt,” said Grace, chiselling out each word. “Her aunt. And I rather suspect that most women would feel jealous if an aunt took an old boyfriend of theirs. They just would.”

Grace waited for Isabel to say something, but Isabel had nothing to say. Elation had been replaced by despair. Here was another complication, weightier still than all the others. Cat was her niece, her closest relative. They had had their disagree-ments in the past, but had always patched them up. This might be different. This touched that dark, primeval area of the human psyche: sexual jealousy.

Grace now continued. “You see,” she said, “the reason we know Cat would feel that way is that people are human. That’s something you need to write about in that Review of yours.” She nodded to the pile of manuscripts. “People are human. Think about that.”

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

E

THE SUMMER SOLSTICE came two days later. Isabel had always thought that Scotland did badly with its solstices. Summer, it seemed, had hardly started by the third week of June; it was no time for the days to start getting shorter, even if the difference each day was barely noticeable. And as for the winter solstice, that also seemed a cruel trick played on Scotland, as the worst was still to come then, even if the days were meant to be drawing out.

“We’ve decided to do something about the summer solstice,” said Peter Stevenson over the telephone.

“To put it back a month? What a good idea. But can you? I know that you’re influential, but . . .”

Peter laughed. “No. To have a midsummer party,” he said.

“Spontaneously, as you can see from the timing of this invitation. Two days’ notice.”

“I’m never booked that far ahead,” said Isabel. “But I do have houseguests. A cousin and her husband.”

“They sound perfect,” said Peter. “And of course they’re welcome too.”

It was just the sort of invitation that Isabel liked to receive.

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She did not enjoy cocktail parties, unless she was in the very special mood that made them bearable or unless she was the hostess, in which case she could busy herself with duties and would never get stuck. Getting stuck was the problem, thought Isabel. You could not talk to the same people for the whole evening, but how did one get away? Saying “I must let you circulate” was the same as saying “Would you please move on,” and saying “I must circulate” was the equivalent of saying “I must move on; you stay here.” In an extreme situation, one might say,

“I think I’m going to faint,” which would immediately bring about suggestions that one sit down—elsewhere. That enabled movement, but the excuse had to be used sparingly. One could acquire a reputation for fainting too frequently.

“You get invited to cocktail parties in hell,” a friend of Isabel’s had once observed. “There’s one every evening. But I gather there’s nothing to drink. And you have to go.” He frowned and looked regretful. “I’m not looking forward to it,” he went on.

“Not one little bit!”

Isabel had asked him about how he dealt with the problem of being trapped, and he had thought for a moment before he gave his reply.

“You can mention your infectious diseases,” he said. “That sometimes gets people moving. The other possibility is to say: ‘Let’s talk about religion. Let’s really talk about it.’ That works too.”

But this was not a cocktail party. West Grange House, a Georgian house behind walls, stood in the middle of a large garden that had been transformed for the occasion. Long trestle tables, covered with white linen cloths, had been set up beneath the two large oak trees that stood mid-lawn. Along these tables were wooden chairs, at least forty of them, and 1 4 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h places were laid before each: white napkins, glasses, silver. Near the large, sunken rockery, a table had been set up for the bar; next to it was a large tin bath in which stood a big lump of ice, like an ice sculpture awaiting its sculptor, with bottles nestling round its base.

Isabel liked this house. She liked the air of quietness, the feeling of being away from the fray, which, she thought, is exactly what a house should provide. She liked the feeling, too, that things were planned here; that what happened in this house happened because it was meant to. And this party, she thought, which had been decided upon only two or three days before, looked as if it were the result of weeks of preparation.

Joe and Mimi were introduced to Peter and Susie and taken off to meet somebody. Isabel, a glass of wine in her hand, walked out onto the lawn, nodding to one or two friends in the clusters of guests. It was a clear, warm evening, in spite of Isabel’s foreboding that the Scottish weather would misbehave; perhaps this was global warming, the creeping of Mediterranean conditions northwards, the migration of species into northern zones; hammerhead sharks in the Irish Sea—that was a thought—scorpions in the villages of England. But we had been warned, she reminded herself, that global warming would bring Scotland only more rain and less sun.

She looked heavenwards, and felt dizzied, as she always did when she looked up into an empty sky; the eye looked for something, some finite point to alight upon, and saw nothing. It might make one dizzy, she told herself, but it might make one humble too. Our human pretensions, our sense that we were what mattered: all of this was put in its proper place by simply looking up at the sky and realizing how very tiny and insignificant we were. Our biggest cities, our most elaborate sympho-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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nies, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the smartest gadgets, were nothing really, just a momentary arrangement of the tiny number of atoms we had in our minuscule patch of space. Nothing.

“A monkey puzzle tree.”

Isabel turned round. Mimi, a glass of what looked like champagne in her hand, had come up behind her.

“Yes,” said Isabel, glancing at the tree at the far end of the garden. “They used to be very popular. The Victorians loved them and put them everywhere.”

“You’re so lucky with your soil,” said Mimi. “You have this lovely rich soil. My garden in Dallas is clay. And it gets so dry.”

It sounded to Isabel as if Mimi were reproaching herself.

“You can’t help your soil,” Isabel said. “Nor your weather.”

Mimi looked at a clump of rhododendrons in flower along one of the garden walls, the blossoms pink and red against the dark green of the leaves. “Our soil is our fault—to an extent.

Remember the dust bowl. Dust storms and tumbleweed? That was human greed. And we repeat that sort of mistake, don’t we?

Look at Las Vegas, if you can bear to. That’s in the desert, we should remind ourselves. We’ve built that dreadful disaster in the desert, of all places.”

“I suppose somebody likes Las Vegas,” said Isabel.

Mimi was silent. There was a bird somewhere in the undergrowth, hopping about, making the leaves rustle.

“I’m sorry about the other day,” Mimi said suddenly. “I’m not sure if I should have told you what I told you. About your mother.”

Isabel continued to stare at the point where the bird had been. “I’m glad that you did. And I asked you to. If you had refused I would have felt that you were hiding something from me. And we have to know these things . . .”

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

“Do we?” asked Mimi.

“Once we suspect them.”

Mimi was unconvinced. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m not sure that we want our parents to be human. We know that they are, of course, but it’s a special sort of knowledge—or I think it is. Like the knowledge that we’re not here on this earth for ever.

We know that, but we don’t think of it all the time, do we? We put it to the back of our minds.”

Isabel took a sip of her wine. Champagne had been on offer, but she had missed it for some reason. “Well, if we don’t want to know too much about our parents—or about their faults, rather—then maybe that’s because we see ourselves in what they did. We recognise their failings because they are our own failings too. Unacknowledged, perhaps.”

Mimi nodded. “That may be.”

Isabel decided that she would go on. She could talk to Mimi because she was family, but a friend too, and she had always felt that Mimi understood. But how could she put it? And would Mimi be shocked? She had to remind herself that there was nothing shocking about it. Not objectively, but talking to another person about what one felt at that most intimate level was an incursion into the private, whatever people said, however frank the climate of the day.

She turned and looked at Mimi, and saw herself again, for a moment, in the lenses of those oval glasses, as in a mirror. “I was surprised to hear that my mother had had an affair, but . . .

but that’s not all that unusual and people do. However, it was the fact that it was with a younger man, a far younger man.

That . . .”

Mimi smiled. “Shows good taste? A certain spirit?”

“That’s exactly what I’m on the verge of doing.” She had said 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, and it sounded ridiculous. To be on the verge of having an affair! Either one had an affair or one did not.

Isabel looked for signs of surprise in Mimi, but there were none. Mimi just looked at her, as if expecting her to say something else. “But I knew that,” she said. “Jamie. I assumed that.”

Now the surprise was Isabel’s. “I didn’t realise . . .”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Mimi, reaching out for Isabel’s forearm. “We never realise how transparent we are. But people know. It was obvious at that dinner party you gave.”

“You gave.”

“I gave,” acknowledged Mimi. “You can tell when somebody is in love with another person. There’s a conspiratorial look.

No, that’s not quite right. There’s a connivance. No, that’s not correct either. There’s something. Put it that way. There’s something.”

“And you saw that there was something?”

Mimi patted her gently on the arm. “I did.” She paused, looking directly at Isabel. Now, thought Isabel, now come the words of warning, of caution. Do you think that it’s . . . I don’t want to interfere, but . . . Instead, Mimi said, “Who wouldn’t? Or rather, who couldn’t?”

“I’m sorry?”

Mimi spoke clearly. “Who couldn’t be in love with him?

Certainly, if I were your age, which I’m not, and if I were single, which I’m not, I’d have no hesitation in falling for somebody like that.”

It was the third such reaction. Florence Macreadie had said much the same thing, and then Grace. Now it was Mimi’s turn.

Nobody, it seemed, saw a problem. Or did the problem exist only in her imagination?

Isabel was about to speak. She suddenly felt she wanted to 1 4 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tell Mimi about how she had agonised over her feelings for Jamie, and how it now seemed that it had all been unnecessary.

But before she could say anything Mimi said, “A young man like that, of course, turns heads. He’ll have people falling for him left, right and centre. Angie certainly did that evening. Did you see it?”

Isabel felt a sudden stab of anxiety. She had seen Angie talking to Jamie and it had been obvious that they were getting on well. And then there was the invitation for Jamie to join them at the house party. But she had not imagined that it was anything serious.

“They talked a lot, yes. But do you really think that there was more to it than that?”

Mimi laughed. “Oh yes, I do. She was devouring him with her eyes. Throughout the meal, she was hanging on his every word. Which made me think, I’m afraid.”

Isabel smiled. “But I thought that you had already done that bit of thinking. I thought that you had your doubts about Angie’s commitment to Tom.”

Mimi made a gesture of agreement. “Yes. But this confirmed my suspicions in that respect. A recently engaged woman doesn’t make eyes at a young man if she’s happy with her new fiancé.” She paused and looked at Isabel, as if for confirmation.

“She doesn’t, does she? And you don’t need to be much of a psychologist to reach that conclusion.”

At the far end of the lawn, under one of the oak trees, Susie clapped her hands together. Dinner, brought out on several large serving plates by a pair of young helpers, was now being served on the trestle tables. There would be a seat for almost everybody, Susie called out, and there were extra seats in the kitchen for those who could not be accommodated at the tables.

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Isabel walked with Mimi towards the tables. Susie, seeing Mimi, came to her side and led her to a place in the middle of the larger table. Isabel, detaching herself, was preoccupied with what Mimi had said about Angie. So Angie found Jamie attractive; well, that was hardly earth-shattering news—any woman would, as Mimi herself had said. And if it was true that Angie was after Tom’s money, then that was hardly anybody else’s business, other than Tom’s relatives, who could have an interest in his assets. Fortune hunters were hardly rare, and in places like Highland Park and University Park, those plush suburbs on the edge of Dallas where there were numerous oil and other fortunes—the Hunts, the Perots and others in that league—

people must know about the need to be careful. If Angie had penetrated the defences of those tight circles and found a middle-aged man who was prepared to share his millions with her, then she was not doing much more than playing a wealthy society by its own rules, and nobody should be unduly surprised or concerned. And certainly she, Isabel Dalhousie, should keep out of it; she who had recently decided that she would mind her own business and not get caught up in the affairs of others. Yet this was the same she who found this so very difficult and who could not ignore the needs of those with whom she came into what she called moral proximity.

She found a seat at one of the tables, not far from the end, and sat down. She was beside a thin-faced man with a shock of dark hair and that almost translucent skin which goes with a particular strain of Celtic genes. She shook hands with him and they exchanged names. He was Seamus. Of course you are, she thought; that name went with the genes. And on her other side sat a tall, attractive girl of about twenty, with a wide smile and an Australian accent. Her name was Miranda, and she had 1 5 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h come with one of the other guests, she said, adding that she knew nobody else in Edinburgh apart from the people she was staying with. “And I have to find a job,” she said, the smile spreading across her face. “Or I’m going to starve.”

“I could try to help,” said Isabel, almost automatically. She sneaked a glance at Miranda’s plate. It was stacked high with food. Perhaps this was her first proper meal for days . . . But then she had said that she was staying with people, and that implied that she was being fed. Unless there was a category of guests whom one did not have to feed. Isabel smiled at the thought. Please come and stay with me, but I won’t be able to feed you. I hope you don’t mind . . .

“Could you?” said Miranda eagerly. “Could you really?”

Isabel had not thought before she spoke, and now realised that she had no idea how she might help. How could she find anybody a job? It was moral proximity again; if one sat next to somebody one had to at least try to help her find a job. Certainly one could not let that person starve.

“Well, I’m not sure,” Isabel said. “I don’t know . . .”

The disappointment showed in Miranda’s face, and Isabel immediately relented.

“What can you do?” she asked.

“Anything,” said Miranda. “Anything general. I’m happy to do anything. I’m not fussy, you see. No worries.” She laughed.

“And I can cook too. No worries there either.”

Isabel thought for a moment. She imagined living in a world as uncomplicated as Miranda’s seemed to be. A world in which there would be, as Miranda had said—twice—no worries. She looked at Miranda and saw that there were small freckles on her face, and she noted, too, that her nose was aquiline, markedly 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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so; and then there was a bracelet on her sun-tanned forearm, one of those plaited elephant-hair bracelets that people picked up in Nairobi or Cape Town or somewhere like that. And she looked up at the sky, just for a moment, at the high blue, which seemed to dance—a trick of the light, and the emptiness—and she thought of Jamie suddenly, and thought, Bless him, look after him; but to what gods she muttered this she had no idea. Gods of that empty sky, perhaps, gods who reigned over those spaces, dispensing a storm here, clement weather there, who answered, or ignored, the prayers of sailors and imaginative women.

She turned again to Miranda, who smiled back at her expectantly. Cat had talked about needing somebody during the summer, particularly if Eddie took a holiday, as she thought he might. He had not taken a holiday last year, but now he was talking of going to France with a nameless friend about whom Cat knew nothing, not even the gender. If Eddie did this—and Cat was keen to encourage him to do anything that would boost his confidence—then she would certainly be short-handed, particularly during the Festival, when the number of delicatessen-oriented people staying in the area seemed almost to double.

Miranda could be the solution to this staff problem, so Isabel gave Miranda her telephone number and suggested that she call her the following day. She talked to both Seamus and Miranda during the meal, and they chatted with each other across Isabel while she spoke to the woman opposite her. It was an easy, relaxed atmosphere and the weather held.

At the end of the meal, people were encouraged to get up from the table and help themselves to coffee in the kitchen.

Isabel left Seamus and Miranda deep in conversation. Seamus had been in Perth and wanted to go back. Miranda had lived 1 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h there for a time, and they had discovered mutual friends whose exploits, related by Seamus, were causing them both hilarity.

Now you know somebody, Isabel thought with satisfaction, and tomorrow you may have a job. She looked around for Mimi and Joe; they were in conversation at the other end of the table with Malcolm and Nicky Wood, both singers. She did not need to worry about them: the talk, which was already animated, would be about choirs. Mimi sang in the choir of a high Episcopal church in Dallas, one that claimed to possess a holy relic, a fragment of the true cross. Unlikely, thought Isabel, but then people believe in all sorts of things, some even more unlikely than that.

How many people in the United States believed that they had been abducted by aliens? It was a depressingly large number.

And the aliens always gave them back! Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort.

Isabel walked across the lawn towards the kitchen door at the back of the house. There was a chill in the air now, not enough to spoil the evening, but a sign of the advancing night.

A white night, she thought, like the midsummer nights of St.

Petersburg, when it never became dark; it was so still; there wasn’t a hint of breeze.

She moved across the small courtyard and headed toward the kitchen. There were several guests ahead of her: a man in a mustard-coloured linen jacket; a woman in a rather-too-formal dress with a stole across her shoulders; a young man with a high complexion who was regaling them with a story. The man in the linen jacket half turned and caught Isabel’s eye. She knew him but could not remember his name or what he did. He looked at her briefly, obviously in the same position of uncertainty, and smiled before returning his attention to his companions. Then, in the kitchen, there were more guests, coffee cups in hand.

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Isabel helped herself to coffee and began to move back towards the lawn. Peter and Susie had planned music and she could hear, drifting from one of the rooms further inside the house, the first strains of a fiddle tune. She turned round and went back down a corridor that led to the hall and the staircase.

The music was coming from a room to the right—it was one of those lilting Scottish fiddle tunes that celebrated somebody’s return or departure from Islay or Skye or somewhere like that, or a battle that took place a long time ago; maybe it was even that curiously named “Neil Gow’s Lament for His Second Wife.” She paused and listened. There was something about this music that always affected her strongly; perhaps because it came from such a particular place. It could not be the music of anywhere else. It was the music of Scotland and it spoke of the country she loved. She closed her eyes. What was Scotland to her? Her place, yes. And it was right that one’s place should make one’s heart stop with longing, particularly when it was as beautiful as was Scotland. The rose of all the world is not for me, MacDiarmid had written. I want for my part / Only the little white rose of Scotland / That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.

She opened her eyes. She was aware that somebody, a woman, had come up behind her. “That tune,” she said. She made the remark, or the beginning of a remark, before she took in who it was, and now she gave a slight start of surprise.

“Yes,” said the woman. “We’ve met before, haven’t we? Cynthia Vaughan.”

Isabel inclined her head. “Of course. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t putting two and two together. I saw you outside, at the other end of the table, but hadn’t . . .”

Cynthia raised a hand. “I wasn’t sure either,” she said. “And then somebody said yes, it was you. I can’t remember exactly 1 5 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h when we met last time, but wasn’t it on that committee—the one to do with the hospital?”

They established where it was, and when, and they talked briefly about what had happened to the committee. Isabel thought: So this is her, Patrick’s mother. The possessive one.

She certainly looked the part—the matron, the galleon in full sail; she was tall, and there was that look Isabel always associated with political women—a firmness, a determination to stick to the agenda.

They had been standing near the door that led into the large dining room, where the music was coming from. “We’re in the way,” said Cynthia, gently steering Isabel away. “Here’s a sofa.

We can sit down here.”

Isabel slightly resented being drawn away and told to sit down. What if she preferred to stand? But it was quite in character, she thought, for a woman like this to tell people what to do, and she found some amusement in that. And it was obvious that Cynthia had something to say to her, which intrigued Isabel; something about Cat, perhaps—if she knew of the connection.

“I gather that we have something in common,” said Cynthia.

Isabel thought: She wastes no time. “Yes,” she said. “You’re Patrick’s . . .”

“I’m Patrick’s mother,” said Cynthia. “Yes. And you are Cat’s aunt, I believe. I must say that you look rather young for that.”

Isabel smiled. There had been no declaration of war yet, but she thought it would probably come soon; indirectly, she thought, but then she looked again at the haughty nose and the firmness of the lips and decided that it might not be all that indirect.

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“Cat was born when my brother was quite young. That makes me a young aunt,” Isabel said pleasantly. “And Patrick came to my place for dinner. I liked him.” She uttered the lie without thinking, and immediately said to herself: Social lies are so easy.

She had not intended that the comment should impress Cynthia, nor ingratiate her with the older woman, and it did neither. Cynthia took a sip of her coffee and stared into her cup, as if the compliment was so obviously true that she was not required to acknowledge it.

“Patrick’s doing very well in his firm,” she said. “He was with Dickson Minto, you know. Bruce Minto—I don’t know if you know him, but he’s one of the most successful lawyers in the country—he trained him. Personally. Then Patrick was offered this new job and he took it. He left with Bruce’s blessing.”

“It’s always better that way,” said Isabel.

Again there was no response to her remark. Isabel felt awkward. So far in the conversation she had uttered platitudes, and she felt foolish and ill at ease, as one does in a conversation where the other party has the advantage. There was no reason for her to feel this way, she was at least the intellectual equal of this political woman; it was a question of what people called alpha behaviour. Isabel was never sure exactly what alpha qualities were, but they seemed to have something to do with the desire—and ability—to dominate others. People usually spoke of alpha males, but there was no reason, surely, that there should not be alpha women. And if such people existed, then Cynthia was certainly one.

Cynthia had not been looking at Isabel as she spoke, but now she did, and Isabel felt the other woman’s rather large 1 5 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h brown eyes on her. “It’s difficult these days,” she said. “It’s so competitive. Even for people like Patrick, who are . . . well, who are on top of things. They have to work all hours of the day. All those transactions, those deals that they get involved in.”

She paused and Isabel felt that her agreement was required and that it would be all right now to say something trite. “Of course,” she said. “How they do it—”

“Patrick was talking to me the other day,” interrupted Cynthia. “He was telling me that they were involved in something or other which required them to sleep in the office! They were working until three in the morning and then had to get back to work at seven. They have fold-out beds and the lawyers sleep on those.”

How ridiculous, thought Isabel. Firemen might do that, and doctors perhaps. But why should lawyers? She knew, though, that it was true. The whole culture of work had become so intrusive and demanding that people had to do it. And the result was that they were left with little time for simply living their lives, for going for a walk, for sitting in a bar, for reading a book.

It was all work.

“Why do people have to work so hard?” she asked. “Do you think it’s natural to work ten hours a day, every day? Were we made to do that, do you think?”

Cynthia frowned. She looked rather displeased by this remark, as if Isabel had interrupted the flow of her thought with some specious question. “That’s how it is,” she said. “It’s China and India, isn’t it? They are prepared to work for next to nothing, which means that our people have to run to keep still.

Nobody can compete with the sweatshops.”

Isabel thought that was probably right. If we believed that 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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we could survive on our wits without actually making anything, then we were living in a fool’s paradise. But she was not sure that this applied to lawyers. So she simply said, “No.”

“No,” echoed Cynthia. “Anyway, Patrick does all this very cheerfully, I must say. And he’s doing very well, as I said.” She paused. “His career is very important to him, you know.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Isabel.

Cynthia reached out and picked a piece of fluff off a cushion and twisted it between her fingers. “I’m not sure that it’s a terribly good idea for him to get too emotionally involved with anybody at this stage,” she said quietly. “These next few years will be pretty important for him, job-wise. I imagine that he might be offered a partnership before too long. If he applies himself, that is.”

Isabel tried not to grin. The approach had come, and she marvelled at Cynthia’s effrontery. It amazed her that anybody would think this way, but it was even more astonishing that Cynthia felt that she could raise the issue like this. She was about to invite her, Isabel thought, to interfere.

“Emotional involvement is what people do,” said Isabel. “All of us.”

Cynthia drew in her breath. “I don’t think they’re suited,”

she said. “Sorry to have to say it. But I don’t.”

“It’s difficult to say,” said Isabel evenly. “Very different people, or people who strike others as being very different from each other, can get on very well. It’s chemistry, don’t you think?”

Cynthia’s eyes were upon her again. “I know my own son,”

she said. “I know what he’s like.”

“I’m sure you do. But when it comes to these things, to . . .

well, sex, it’s a very private matter, isn’t it? And can we ever tell 1 5 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h who’s going to get on well sexually with whom? I can’t. I’ve never been able to.”

Cynthia stiffened. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I don’t imagine that sex lies behind it.”

Isabel was silent. Patrick’s mother obviously did not know Cat. Isabel remembered telling Cat that she thought she sexu-alised the world too much. And Cat had laughed and said, “But, Isabel, the world is sexual. It is.”

Cynthia looked at her, but when Isabel said nothing, she continued, “I don’t know you well. But I’m sure that we both have the interests of Patrick and Kate—”

“Cat,” corrected Isabel.

“Cat. We both have their best interests at heart. A word from you, perhaps, to your niece might help her see that this is not necessarily the best thing for them. Do you think so?”

“No,” said Isabel. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

Cynthia suddenly got to her feet. “I’m sorry that I raised this,” she said. “I thought that we might see things in the same way. We obviously don’t.”

Isabel rose to stand beside her. “Don’t you think that we should keep out of it?” she said. “It’s their business, after all.”

She wanted to add, “And it’s time to let go of your son,” but she did not, because she felt that it would be cruel to say that, even if it was abundantly clear that that was what Cynthia needed to do.

Later that evening, as she walked back with Joe and Mimi and she described the conversation to them, Mimi said, “You were right not to say anything more. Poor woman. He’s all she has, and that’s rather sad, isn’t it? People cling. It’s not the best way, but you can understand why they cling.”

Isabel felt chastened. The needs of others were not a matT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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ter to be treated lightly, even when they were unreasonable, as was the case with Cynthia. I should feel sympathy for her, she thought, not irritation. And yet one could not hold on to somebody beyond a natural point, and Patrick, surely, had reached that point where his mother should let him go to live his own life. This made her think of Jamie, of course.

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

E

MIRANDA, the Australian whom she had met at the Stevenson party, telephoned at nine o’clock the following morning, reminding Isabel that she had offered to speak to Cat about a job. Isabel, immured in her morning room with her coffee and the Scotsman crossword, with Mimi seated opposite her reading The Times, was surprised that she should call so early and so soon after the offer was made. But she was not irritated, as one sometimes may be when a promise is called in. It was understandable that Miranda should call and remind her; finding a job was a major thing for her. Then there was her age—nineteen or twenty-one is impatient, or less patient, Isabel thought, than thirty or forty. Isabel agreed to speak to Cat that morning and to telephone her once she had found out whether Cat could offer her anything.

“I hope you don’t think I’m being pushy,” Miranda said.

“Calling straight away and all. But you did say . . .”

“I did,” said Isabel. “And I’ll do what I said I would do.”

Isabel thought that it would be easier to discuss this with Cat in person, so she went into Bruntsfield an hour or so later.

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Eddie was standing at the door of the delicatessen when she arrived. He turned to her distractedly and then spat out, “Somebody’s stolen coffee again.” Then he swore—a simple expletive, crude, dirty.

Isabel looked at Eddie. He was staring down the street, his lip quivering in anger, his face flushed, as if he had just come running from somewhere. There were times when he seemed on the brink of tears, from sheer injustice, Isabel had always thought, and from that ancient, unspecified hurt; now it was more immediate.

“Stolen coffee?”

Eddie turned to face her. “It happens all the time,” he said.

“They just go for it. It’s always packets of coffee. Nine times out of ten.”

Isabel looked down the street. It was that time in the morning when things were at their quietest: those going to work had caught their lumbering buses, and it was too early for the morning shoppers to come out. A man walked past with his dog, a small cairn terrier with a collar on which dog was written helpfully in studs; the man glanced at Isabel and then at Eddie and smiled. There was a woman with a heavy bag, and a couple of boys of fourteen or fifteen, loose-limbed, dressed in black jeans sinking to the ground and voluminous T-shirts, engaged in the tribal debate of teenagers. She saw no fleeing shoplifters.

She followed Eddie inside, and the air changed; the smell of coffee (a temptation perhaps to the thieves), of ripening cheeses; the dry, itchy notes of pulses and cereals. Isabel had always felt that this was the smell of real food—supermarkets smelled of chemicals and detergents and cellophane wrapping.

Eddie, normally laconic, was vocal. “I don’t know why they 1 6 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h go for it,” he said. “They stuff their pockets with that Kenyan blend with the nice picture on it. Then they run out of the shop.”

Isabel thought. She had been in charge of the delicatessen for a week not all that long ago, when Cat had gone to a wedding in Italy, and she had seen no signs of shoplifting. Had she missed it? She cast her mind back. She remembered stacking the coffee section, and she remembered packets with a picture.

She had assumed that everybody who came into the shop was honest, which was the general assumption that she made about others.

She looked at Eddie, who was busying himself with counting the packets of coffee on the shelf. He was still quivering with rage.

“I always assume that people are good,” said Isabel. “I’m naïve, I suppose.”

“They aren’t,” muttered Eddie.

“I suppose I shouldn’t trust people,” Isabel went on.

“Don’t,” said Eddie. “Never.”

She moved to the newspaper rack. What had happened to Eddie before he came to work here—and Isabel had never found out what that was—must have destroyed his trust in people. He had confided in Cat, she believed, and Cat had kept the confidence, not revealing what Eddie had said to her. But Isabel knew that it was something dark, and she did not want to know the details. So although she did not want to arouse Eddie’s private demons, she did not feel she could let this denial of trust go answered.

She picked up a paper and went to stand beside Eddie. “You can’t say that about trust, Eddie. You have to trust somebody.”

The young man stopped in the act of counting, his hand 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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resting on the edge of the shelf. Isabel was aware of his breathing, which seemed to come more quickly than usual, as if he had been exerting himself. He did not look at her, but kept his gaze upon the packets of coffee in front of him.

“I don’t,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I just don’t.”

“Because of something that happened to you?” She had not meant to say that, but it had come out.

He did nothing, said nothing. Isabel quickly thought, I must get away from this topic.

“Anyway,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it. But remember that there are some people you can trust. Me. Cat. You can trust us, Eddie. And not everyone who comes into this shop is going to steal something. They really aren’t.”

She moved back to the newspaper rack and replaced the paper, since Cat had arrived, a shopping bag in her hand. Isabel greeted her, leaving Eddie to his thoughts. “We’ve had shoplifters,” she whispered. “Eddie’s very upset.”

Cat glanced at Eddie and sighed. With a nod of her head she signalled to Isabel to follow her into the office at the back.

“He gets really upset over that,” said Cat once they were out of Eddie’s earshot. “It’s one of the things that seems to trigger memories for him. He gets over it, of course, but I really feel for him when it happens.”

“He said something about not trusting anybody,” said Isabel.

Cat opened her shopping bag and took out a small container of nail polish, which she held against her nails to assess the colour match.

“He doesn’t,” said Cat. “Poor Eddie. He doesn’t trust anybody. Even himself.”

Isabel frowned. The idea of not trusting oneself was a strange one. It was possible to imagine not trusting anybody 1 6 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h else—bleak though such a position would be—but not to trust oneself? Did that make sense?

Cat put down the bottle of nail polish and looked up at Isabel. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what happens, I gather. People to whom really bad things happen don’t trust their own feelings.

Did they ask for it? Did they deserve it? Those sort of questions.

And that means they don’t trust themselves.”

Yes, thought Isabel, you’re right. And she remembered that when John Liamor had left her she had asked herself whether she had brought about his departure. For a time she had blamed herself for his womanising, for his constant affairs, and had felt, in some vague, unspecified way, that it was her failure to make him happy that had driven him into the arms of others. Such nonsense, of course, but she had believed it then.

Cat shrugged. “Leave him,” she said. “He’s getting a bit better—generally. Don’t talk to him about it.”

Isabel agreed. “But I do want to talk to you,” she said. “Are you still thinking of taking on somebody else?”

Cat said that she was. “There’s an Australian girl I met,”

Isabel said. “She’s looking for something. I get the impression that she’d be a very good worker. And she’s available pretty much immediately.”

Cat was interested. “Will she be all right with Eddie?” she asked. “You know how he’s frightened of people.”

Isabel did not know how to answer that question. She knew very little about Miranda, now that she came to think of it. All she knew was that she came from Australia and wanted to work.

But could she be trusted? Of course she could be, provided, of course, that one could trust somebody of whose past one knew nothing and of whose present one could not say much more than freckles, an engaging smile and an apparent optimism. PerT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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haps that was a good enough basis for trust, even in a world in which people destroyed the fragile sense of self of young men like Eddie and thought, one assumed, nothing of it.

“She seems nice enough.” That poor, overworked word, she thought, nice.

“I’ll try her now,” said Cat, taking the piece of paper on which Isabel had written Miranda’s telephone number.

Isabel left, pausing at Eddie’s side on the way out. The young man was standing disconsolately, staring out of the window, his gaze unfocused. She took his hand, which felt warm to her, and a bit damp. “We’re very fond of you, you know,” she whispered. “Cat. Me. We’re very fond of you.”

She gave his hand a squeeze and, after a moment, she felt him return the pressure, not very convincingly, but detectably nonetheless.

M I M I WA S I N T H E G A R D E N when Isabel returned to the house. Isabel went out to join her, having seen her from the kitchen window, standing beside a large clump of flowering azaleas near the small wooden summer house.

“Something been digging here,” said Mimi, pointing to the ground at her feet. “Look. A mole?”

Isabel looked down at the scratchings in the lawn. A few lines of dark earth had been scattered across a small area of grass and a bulb, dug from the edge of the flowerbed, had been left against a crenellation of mud. She looked for the familiar signs: a feather, perhaps; a fragment of bone from a vole or shrew, or even a chicken leg salvaged from kitchen pickings, but there was nothing.

“Brother Fox,” she said. “This is his territory.”

1 6 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Mimi looked enquiringly at Isabel, the edge of the summer house reflected in the lens of her glasses.

“Brother Fox?”

“Our urban fox,” said Isabel. “We call him Brother Fox because . . . well, I suppose it’s because he has to have a name and Grace and I feel that we know him quite well. So it’s Brother Fox.”

“St. Francis . . .”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “There is a Franciscan ring to it. Brother Sun, wasn’t it? And why not?”

“No reason at all,” said Mimi. “One of my favourite saints.

You know that picture, do you, the one in Florence, where the saint stands with his arms out and all the birds are at his feet—

those strange, naïvely painted birds, like little feathered boxes.”

She paused. “I’d like to see him, this Brother Fox of yours. Will he make an appearance?”

Isabel looked about the garden. “There’s something unpredictable about him. Sometimes, though, I feel as if he’s watching me. I just get that feeling.”

“And he is? He is really watching you?”

Isabel knew it sounded unlikely, but it was true. “Yes. It’s happened time and time again. I might be in my study, working, and I feel that there are eyes on me—eyes outside. And if I look up I see Brother Fox out in the garden, or see a flash of gold, which is him. He’s very beautiful, you see. Reddish-gold. A most beautiful creature.”

Isabel reached out and touched one of the flowers on the azalea bush. Nature was so beguiling in many of its corners; it was the tiny details that were important: the colour of these azaleas, somewhere between pink and red; the red-gold of fox fur. Why should we alone find the world beautiful? Or 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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Brother Fox appreciate what he saw about him, and love it, as we did? No, we should not make the mistake of anthropomor-phism: the world for him was really not much more than a struggle for food, for life; a matter of genetic survival against all the competing genes; just struggle. And we were the enemy, with our dogs and our gas and our huntsmen with rifles; all terror and pain for foxes. But Brother Fox was not scared of her; he was wary, when he watched, but not scared.

The azalea was next to a mahonia bush, with its yellow flowers and those spiky leaves, so different from the azalea. Isabel’s hand moved on to touch the mahonia; it reminded her of holly, but it was more beautiful.

“I occasionally dream of Brother Fox,” she said to Mimi. “In my dreams he can speak. It’s very strange, but not at all odd in the dream, you know. He speaks with a slightly high-pitched, rather refined Scottish voice, but once he spoke French, and that surprised me. He used subjunctives and I remembered thinking how remarkable it was that an animal should have the subjunctive.” She used the construction “have the subjunctive”

without thinking that it might have sounded strange to Mimi.

Scots said “I have the Gaelic” when they could speak Gaelic.

Mimi laughed. “And what did he say in these dreams?

Small talk?”

Isabel searched her memory. Dreams are lodged in a very short-term part of the memory, but she had committed these to more permanent storage because they had been so unusual.

Her last conversation with Brother Fox had been something about how we control our lives and how contingency plays a part in what we are. She remembered saying to him that he was a fox—and he had agreed—and that the pattern of his life was determined by that brute fact of biology. But then he had said, 1 6 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h And so is yours, and she had felt indignant that a fox should call into question her free will. Their conversation had ended in an atmosphere of polite distance, which Isabel regretted, as she had had a sense of the preciousness of speaking with a fox.

She told Mimi this, and Mimi said, “But he was right, wasn’t he? Or you were, rather. Conversations in our dreams are really conversations with ourselves, aren’t they? Have you ever thought of it that way?”

“No, but you’re right. Internal rhetoric—that’s what philosophers would call it.” A mahonia leaf pricked the tip of her finger, just slightly, but she said to herself: I must be careful of sharp things. Internal rhetoric. “But . . . but surely, we don’t have to agree with what is said by the people to whom we are talking in our dreams? Of course we may put words into their mouths—we are after all the director of our dreams—”

“And producer,” interjected Mimi.

“Yes, and producer. But what is said in the dream by other people may just be what we think those other people are likely to say. The fact that we write the lines for them doesn’t mean that we agree with the sentiments behind the lines, does it?”

Mimi felt that she needed time to think about this. Philosophy, she had always thought, was often just a matter of common sense; a matter of finding the words to describe what is, or, in some cases, what should be. What Isabel had just said might have sounded complicated, but in reality it was not. The play-wright, the novelist did not endorse what their characters said—

that seemed clear enough. But where did it all come from?

Every word of Shakespeare was, after all, Shakespeare; if something came from the mind of the writer, then it was there in that mind, even if only as a possibility. And surely the insights of psy-chology underlined the point that what we talked about 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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what we were interested in, and, sometimes, what we believe—

even if we said we didn’t! That was why we sometimes criticised others for doing exactly what we would want to do ourselves but did not dare—which meant that the writer might not be believed in protesting that the words on the page were nothing to do to with him. They could well be.

Mimi thought of somebody she knew who often spoke of a mutual friend’s tendency to consult the plastic surgeon. “Such a conservationist,” the critic said. “She deserves some sort of award.”

And Mimi had politely observed that perhaps she, the critic, would like to do the same thing, which had not gone down well, because, she thought, it was true. But it had stopped the remarks.

“Sometimes we say things which are the—” Mimi began, but Isabel, who had not heard her, had started to say something else.

“I know that the dreams of others are tedious,” she said.

“And I know I shouldn’t bore you with these things. But I had an extremely odd dream last night.”

“About Brother Fox?” asked Mimi.

“No,” said Isabel. “About Tom and Angie. Your friends.”

“You must have been thinking about them during the day,”

offered Mimi. “I find that what I dream about very much reflects what has been on my mind that day. It happens all the time.”

Isabel turned away from the mahonia and faced Mimi. “It was very odd,” she said. “Quite disconcerting, in fact.”

“One shouldn’t let dreams worry you,” said Mimi reassuringly. “Everybody does disconcerting things in dreams.”

“Oh, I behaved myself,” said Isabel. “I don’t think I had much to do or say in the dream. I was there, I suppose, because 1 7 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h I saw what happened. But I didn’t do anything. I was just standing there, a bit shocked, I think.”

Mimi raised an eyebrow. She waited for Isabel to continue.

“We were somewhere over in the west of Scotland,” Isabel went on. “I think that it was on the Mull of Kintyre, or somewhere like that. We were in a house near the sea, and there was a room with one of those extraordinary cases of little stuffed animals dressed up in outfits, riding tiny bicycles, playing croquet.

You know those strange things? The Victorians loved them.

They would gas kittens, send them off to the taxidermist, and then put them into a sort of tableau vivant, or tableau mort, I suppose. An orchestra of kittens, with minute instruments. A court scene with kitten jurors and kitten lawyers.”

Mimi made a face. She liked cats, and indeed had been the owner of a dynasty of distinguished cats, including Arthur Brown, an immense and dignified furry ball, who had been much admired by all in that part of Dallas, and who had died, suddenly, on the kitchen floor, of a heart attack, much as overworked busi-nessmen dropped on the golf course. “I don’t approve . . .”

“Neither do I,” Isabel supplied. “But there was one of those cases in the room, and then in came Tom and Angie. They looked at the case, and walked out of the room. Then Angie came back in alone and started to read the Scotsman on the sofa. She turned to me and said, ‘I’ve killed Tom, you know.’ And that was it.”

Mimi laughed. “Imaginative stuff!”

“I woke up feeling quite sad,” said Isabel.

“One would.” Mimi paused. “Of course there’s a motive, isn’t there? She would be better off if she did that. And the university would be worse off.”

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Isabel did not see what this had to do with SMU, and she asked Mimi to explain.

“Tom said years ago that he was going to make a major bene-faction to Southern Methodist,” said Mimi. “To the law school, in particular, but also to the Meadows School of the Arts. But then when Angie came along he stopped talking about this. Joe was very disappointed. He thought that she had got round him in some way. Anyway, all the law school people decided to take the long view. They thought that Angie would not be around for ever and that once she had got whatever settlement she had in mind, Tom would come back to the idea of giving money to the university. Joe hopes that too, but he’s not so sure that Angie is a temporary fixture. He thinks that Tom would be more likely to go first. So there you have it.”

“Of course,” Isabel said wryly, “that gives people a motive to dispose of her, rather than Tom.”

“Perhaps,” said Mimi. “But remember that the people who would benefit are all very respectable. They wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that.” Of course they might dream of it, she thought, but not consider it. But Isabel would know what she meant.

“No,” said Isabel. “Of course not. But I’m afraid that I can see Angie doing what she did in my dream. She just could, couldn’t she?”

“No,” said Mimi. “I don’t think that she has the imagination.”

She paused, looking at her watch. “But, anyway, Isabel, this sort of thing simply doesn’t happen. Outside novels, of course.”

“Novels have nothing to do with real life?”

“Very little,” said Mimi. “And that’s what makes them such fun.”

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

E

THAT FRIDAY was the day on which they were due to go off to stay with Tom and Angie. Joe and Mimi left in the morning, as they planned to visit Traquair House beforehand. Traquair, the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, had a maze (“Joe will get lost, so we won’t be doing that,” said Mimi) and a library (“Joe will spend the whole visit there”) and the cradle in which James VI slept as an infant, a carved rocking cradle in which the future king had been laid by his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.

“I feel so sorry for her,” said Mimi. “What a difficult country this must have been. All that plotting and intrigue.”

Isabel was sympathetic—up to a point. It was unfortunate having one’s head chopped off by a scheming, suspicious cousin, certainly, but Mary had been no stranger to intrigue.

“She did a fair amount of scheming herself,” she observed. “And then there were those men . . .”

It was a non sequitur, she knew, but it seemed to add to the picture of misfortune. Mimi, though, was not going to let that pass. “But she never really had much choice,” she said. “How old was she when she married the Dauphin? Fifteen, wasn’t it?

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And she’d been betrothed to him at the age of six or something like that. Today we’d call that child abuse.”

“The Dauphin wasn’t the problem, of course. That was just sad. It was the subsequent husbands.”

Mimi raised a finger. She used to be able to quote several lines of the poem that Mary wrote on the death of Francis but now it was gone. Poetry went; no matter how fervently one wished it would stay, it went. She closed her eyes. By day, by night, I think of him—that came into it. He had doted on her, that little boy, and she had loved him in return, but rather as a sister would love her little brother, the child groom with his child bride. Her elegy to him had the drum-beat of real grief in its lines.

“And Darnley,” said Isabel.

Mimi sighed. “You know, it always surprises me. People say that they can’t understand why she chose to get mixed up with Darnley. But surely it’s obvious. Or at least I think it is. Darnley was handsome, and he was the only man around who was taller than she was. He was also fond of a party.”

“I would have thought those provided good enough reason.

Women like handsome men who are fun. And then, a little bit later, they realise their mistake.”

“Exactly,” said Mimi. “Getting involved with anyone for their looks alone is folly. Sheer folly.”

“And yet people do it, don’t they? It’s another example of human frailty, I suppose.” Isabel thought: If Jamie did not look like he did, would I feel the way I do about him? What if Jamie were short, or overweight, or had an unflattering profile? Would I love him? These thoughts unsettled her. John Liamor had been good-looking—and had made use of the fact. He had that 1 7 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dark hair that the Irish can carry off so well, and chiselled features and, of course, I loved him for that. Of course I did. She remembered the poem that Yeats had written to Anne Gregory about how only God would love somebody for herself and not her yellow hair.

She knew that she would not feel the way she did about Jamie if he were not good-looking. And that, she thought, was a dispiriting conclusion, for it meant that it was really a love of beauty that was at work; we love the beautiful, and we find it in a person. The affection one feels for a person—that familiar, solid loyalty that grows around those to whom we have become accustomed, or on whom we have come to depend—is different from love, or at least from romantic love. It was a compromise; the ersatz coffee that we drink when the real is unobtainable.

Mimi brought an end to these thoughts. “Whatever miscalculations she made,” she said, “Mary was a brave woman. Have you read her last letter, the one that she sent to Henry III? I find it terribly moving, that letter.”

Isabel had, and recalled the dignity of the sentences in which she describes the shabby behaviour of those who had secured her execution; of how they had kept from the Queen of Scots her chaplain, so that he could not come to hear her confession and give her the comfort of the last sacrament. And how she sent to Henry two precious stones as talismans against illness; and the awful finality of the sentence, Wednesday, at two in the morning. It was almost unbearable, just to read, but worse was to come in the letter which Robert Wynkfielde wrote about the execution: a testament to her bravery and dignity, as well as to the loyalty of dogs; for Mary’s little dog was found to be hiding in her skirts, unwilling to leave the body of its mistress, and had had to be washed of the Queen’s blood. And that, 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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Isabel, was how it all ended in Scotland. We had a stirring history, which people romanticised, but at the end of the day it ended in blood.

She might take Mimi, she thought, to visit her friend Rosalind Marshall, who had written about Scottish queens. They had spoken about Darnley together in the supermarket in Morningside, of all places, when Isabel, who had been reading his biography at the time, had asked Rosalind’s opinion.

“We must remember how young he was,” said Rosalind.

“That explains a lot, you know. These days a young man like that would be going to clubs and bars.”

“Instead of marrying Mary, Queen of Scots,” mused Isabel.

“Precisely,” said Rosalind, reaching for a packet of Arbo-rio rice.

After Joe and Mimi had left for Traquair, Isabel spent several hours working in her study. Grace was in the house, but they had not spoken much that morning, as Grace had been in one of her moods. Sometimes Isabel would enquire as to the reason for the mood, and would receive a diatribe on some issue, but usually she tactfully waited for the indignation or outrage to subside. This morning she suspected that it was political, as it had been a few days ago when the morning paper had revealed the appointment by the Scottish administration of three new commissioners: one to deal with obesity, one to protect the rights of children, and another to deal with issues of access to the arts. One such commissioner would have been provocation enough to Grace; the appointment of three was insupportable. “All they want to do is to work out ways of regulating us,” she said. “But our lives are just not their business. If we want to be overweight, then that’s our affair. And as for the rights of children, what about their duties?” The conversation 1 7 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had ended at that rhetorical point, and Isabel, having only just opened her mouth, had shut it again. There would be no victory in debate with Grace; even a commissioner would come off second best in that.

She finished her work, which was the writing of a short piece to introduce a supplement of the Review devoted to self-knowledge. It had not been easy; for some reason she had felt that the piece had become too subjective, as if she were describing her own search for self-knowledge. She printed out what she had written and read through it. She had relied on Alasdair McIntyre as a starting point. He had suggested that the unity of the self be based on the unity of a narrative that started with birth and ended with our death. In other words, we made for ourselves a coherent life story, and that life story—that narrative—enabled us to understand ourselves. But was coher-ence a goal in itself? One might pursue bad goals consistently; one might be consistently self-interested, but would that make for a form of self-knowledge that had any value at all? Isabel thought not. Self-knowledge required more than an understanding of how things work as a narrative; it required an understanding of the character traits that lead to the narrative being what it is. And for this, she concluded, we might attempt to mould our character in the future. I can be better, she thought, if I know what’s wrong with me now.

She put the sheets of paper down and sighed. Was this really a satisfactory way of earning a living? She was not at all sure whether what she wrote would change anything for anybody; it was doubtful that somebody reading her introduction would say to himself, So that’s how it’s done! If she wanted to do that, she would be better doing anything but professional philosophy. If she wanted to change the world and the way people 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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looked at it, then she would do far better being a journalist, who at least would be read, or a broadcaster, who might slip in little bits of advice, or a teacher, who could pour thoughts into the ears of receptive pupils. And yet if she asked any of these whether they would wish to trade their lives for hers, they would all be likely to say that they would.

She packed, her mind still half on self-knowledge, half on the choice of clothing for the weekend. There would be walks, no doubt, and she would need something waterproof. And they might be fairly formal for dinner—Dallas people dressed smartly, she remembered, and so she would need something suitable for the evening. Angie would not dress down; she would wear a cocktail dress and there would be jewellery. She looked at her wardrobe, and felt, for a brief moment, despair. There were word people—idea people—and then there were clothes people—

fashion people. She knew which group she belonged to.

An hour later, her weekend case in the back of her green Swedish car, Isabel drove across town to Stockbridge to collect Jamie. It was a teaching afternoon for him, and the last of his pupils emerged from the front door of his shared stair just as Isabel drew up in her car. The boy, swinging his bassoon with the lightheartedness of one who had just finished a lesson, noticed Isabel’s car and made eye contact with her. She had seen him before, when she had come to Jamie’s flat at the end of a lesson, and they recognised each other, but he looked away again sharply. Isabel smiled; there was a certain point in the teen years, for boys, when the sheer embarrassment of being alive was too much. And this came out in the form of hostility, of grunts, of silent glowers. The world was just wrong to the teenage boy, quite wrong, and all because it failed to understand just how important that particular teenage boy was.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She extracted her telephone from her bag and dialled Jamie’s number to let him know that she was waiting for him.

He would be two minutes, he said, and he was.

“I recognised that boy you were teaching,” Isabel said as they set off. “I met him once before.”

“He was nicer then, I suppose,” said Jamie. “Something’s happened to him. And his bassoon-playing.”

“Puberty,” suggested Isabel.

Jamie laughed. “They come out of it. One of them was horrible last year and then suddenly he started to act like a human being again. The excuses for not practising went away. The scowls. It all went.”

Isabel turned the car into Henderson Row. She felt a sudden surge of excitement. It was Friday afternoon and she and Jamie were going off together into the country. They would be together until Sunday evening, which was the longest time she had ever spent in his company. And they had never been away before; that lent an additional spice to the moment.

“I’ve been looking forward to this weekend,” she said. “I was feeling stale. I haven’t been out of town for ages.”

Jamie half turned in his seat and grinned at her. Sic a smile, she thought in Scots, would melt ilka heirt—such a smile would melt any heart. “I was thinking about it all morning,” he said. “I had a deadly dull rehearsal in the Queen’s Hall. I just wanted to get out of town. To get far away from conductors and other musicians.”

“They’ll want you to perform,” warned Isabel. “There’s a piano, I’m afraid. And I’ve brought some music.”

“Singing with you is different,” said Jamie. “It’s . . . well, it’s casual. I enjoy it.”

Isabel said nothing. She looked ahead at the traffic, which 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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was light for a Friday afternoon. Sometimes one could get caught round about George Street or going up the Mound, but cars were moving freely now and she thought that it would not take them much more than an hour to get to the house, if that.

They were heading for Peebles, to the south of Edinburgh, in roughly the same direction that Joe and Mimi had gone that morning. Tom and Angie had rented a house in a glen further to the west, a house off the normal track of visitors, but which Isabel was aware of. She had a friend who knew the owners.

They were poor, in a genteel sort of way, and her friend had said that everything about the house—the furnishings, the carpets—

was threadbare and worn, growing old in shadow, faded with age. That, apparently, had changed, and a decorator from Edinburgh had splashed colour and renewed texture about the place.

Isabel wondered whether the soul would have been taken out of the house by money and the search for comfort. She could not imagine Angie roughing it, and nor, when he was asked, could Jamie.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s high maintenance, I think.”

“An expensive woman.”

“Yes,” he said. “You could say that. But he’s pretty well off, isn’t he? So that doesn’t matter.”

“And do you think she loves him?” asked Isabel.

Jamie looked out the window. They were now approaching the edge of town and the slopes of the Pentland Hills could be seen rising before them. Behind them, over the North Sea, there were clouds in the sky, and slanting squalls of rain; behind the Pentlands, though, the sky was light, glowing, as if with promise.

He fiddled with a button on his jacket. It was hanging on by a thread, and he had meant to sew it before he came, but ran 1 8 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out of time. “I haven’t given it any thought,” he said quietly.

“And I don’t think you should either.”

Isabel was quick to deny her interest. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to interfere.”

“Are you sure?” Jamie sounded dubious. He had witnessed Isabel’s interventions on more than one occasion, and if they had turned out well—or at least if they had not resulted in disaster—that was, he thought, owing in part to chance.

“All right,” she said. “I confess that I’m intrigued. And who wouldn’t be? A conspicuously wealthy, sophisticated man has a young fiancée with not a great deal of grey matter—well, one thinks about that.”

“It’s his business if he wants to take up with somebody like her,” said Jamie. “That’s what some men want.” He paused and looked at Isabel. “They’ll probably be blissfully happy.”

Isabel conceded that. They could be happy, with each getting from the relationship what each wanted. But what, she asked, if he were to find out that she was interested only in his money? Could he be happy in those circumstances?

“He might be,” said Jamie. “Presumably men like that have a pretty clear idea of what’s what. He might be able to see through her and still say to himself: Well, I don’t care if she doesn’t really love me, I’ve got an attractive young wife, and as long as she behaves herself . . .”

“Which she might not do,” said Isabel quickly. “What if she has an eye for other men?”

Jamie shrugged. “She’d be a fool.”

Isabel drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She wondered whether Jamie was one of those people who just could not understand the tides of passion; who thought that people calculated advantage and disadvantage in matters of 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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heart—they did not; people behaved drunkenly, irrationally when it came to these things. Perhaps that was why Mary, Queen of Scots, married Darnley, against all her obvious interest? But she did not want to go into that. Already their discussion had developed an edge which was not right for a romantic trip into the country—if that was what this was going to be.

Suddenly she was aware of Jamie beside her, of his legs at an angle, of his right arm resting in a position where it almost touched her side, of the wind from the half-open side window in his hair, ruffling it; and the phrase your ordinary human beauty came into her mind, and it seemed to her to be so apt. Beauty that was so ordinary because it required no ornament, no false enhancement; that was ordinary human beauty and it was superior to any other beauty.

He said, suddenly, “Look at those sheep.”

She looked. They were heading now up the hill from Auchendinny, and on the right side of the road there were fields and woods falling away to a river. The sheep were clustered about a hopper into which a farmer was siphoning feed of some sort. Little drifts of powdered feed, dust from the sheep’s table, were being blown away by the wind.

“Their lunch,” she said. They both laughed; there was nothing funny about it, but it seemed to them that something significant had been shared. When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing, because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened? she wondered.

She remembered something. “You know, I came out here quite a few years ago, when the Soviet Union was still in business. Just. It was shortly before its end. There was a woman who was a philosopher who had been sent over here by the Academy 1 8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of Sciences of the USSR, and I was asked to entertain her for a few days. Mostly she wanted to go shopping, because they had so little in their own shops and she needed things. But I brought her out here to Peebles, to have lunch, and she saw sheep in the fields and cried out, ‘Look at all those sheeps! Look at all those sheeps!’ Sheeps. That’s what she said, understandably enough.

And then she said, ‘Do you know, in my country, we have forgotten how to keep animals.’ ”

Jamie was quiet. “And she hadn’t seen . . .”

“She hadn’t seen anything like it,” said Isabel. “Apparently the Soviet countryside was pretty empty. Nobody on the collective farms kept animals. The bond between people and the land, between people and animals, had been broken.”

Isabel remembered something else. “And here’s another thing she said. We had a meeting at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It was an open seminar on political philosophy, and this woman and the two male colleagues who had come with her came to it. They spoke in Russian, and there was a translator.”

She paused as she remembered the translator, a sallow-faced man who had been a chain-smoker and who had slipped out of the room every fifteen minutes to have a cigarette. “Members of the public were invited, but hardly anybody came. There was one man who did, however, a rather thin, very elegant-looking man who must have been in his late seventies, I think. At the end, after our guests had finished, he asked a question. He spoke in Russian, and I saw them turn and stare at him in what seemed to be astonishment. And when I looked to her, this woman philosopher, I saw there were tears in her eyes. I asked her what he had said, and she just shook her head and replied,

‘It’s not what he said. That’s nothing. It’s just that I haven’t heard my language being spoken so beautifully, ever. Ever.’ It tranT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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spired that he was speaking pre-revolutionary Russian, that he was the son of an exile who had been brought up speaking old Russian in France. Our visitors were used to the brutality of Soviet Russian, which was full of crudity and ugliness and jar-gon, and that is what made her cry. To hear real Russian spoken again.”

TO M H A D F O U N D Tarwhinn House through a friend from Austin who had leased it a few years previously. The house had been in the same family for almost three hundred years, or so the owners claimed. It had been built in the seventeenth century by a man of some account in that part of Scotland, and it had remained with his successors until an unwise choice in the 1745 uprising—support for Bonnie Prince Charlie—had resulted in the then head of the family being outlawed, pursued to the very jetty from which he set ignominious sail for France, and his property taken away from him. That was the point at which the new owners acquired it by bribery, insinuating themselves into the position of the disgraced owner and eventually assuming his arms and his name. “An early example of identity theft,” remarked Isabel, when she heard the story.

The current generation felt no need to gloss over the facts of the shameful acquisition and wholeheartedly adopted the romantic associations of the property. But they had other fish to fry, and the house and estate had been neglected. Eventually repairs could be put off no longer—the roof, in particular, was suffering from something which roofers call nail sickness, in which the nail holes through the slates grow larger, the nails weaken, and the slates begin to slip. The owners called in builders and decorators, and the air of damp and fustiness which had 1 8 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h pervaded the house gradually began to be replaced by warmth and light. But this was all an expensive process, and the long summer lets to visitors became all the more important. Somebody like Tom, who was prepared to take the house for two or three months, was ideal.

“There it is,” said Isabel. “Can you see it? Over there.”

Jamie looked in the direction in which Isabel had pointed.

Just above a stand of trees, the roof could be made out, and a few of the windows on the top storey. But then the trees blocked the view, and all he saw were Scots pines and a hillside rising sharp behind.

“One of those tall, thin houses?” he asked.

“I’ve seen it only once,” said Isabel. “And I don’t remember it very well. They had a Scotland’s Gardens open day a few years back and I saw it then. But I didn’t go into the house.”

They turned off the public road at a lane end marked with a modest sign, a piece of painted board that announced tar-whinn house. They were now on the drive up to the house, a dirt track with only a little bit of gravel here and there. There were potholes, filled with water from the last rain, and Isabel slowed down to negotiate her way past them.

They rounded a large cluster of rhododendrons and the house revealed itself. It was four storeys high and had the small windows which marked the fortified houses which people needed to build in those days. It looked rectangular—like a cardboard box standing on its end—but there was a simplicity about it which made it beautiful. The walls were pebble-dash harling and painted with a soft terracotta-coloured wash with just a touch of pink in it. This imparted to the house a soft quality, a sort of luminescence, which the gentle sun of late afternoon now caught, made glow.

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“I love this place,” said Jamie impulsively. “I just love it.”

There were two cars parked on the edge of the large gravelled circle at the front of the house; one was Joe and Mimi’s hire car, a small red vehicle which somebody had dented at the back, and the other was the large car which Isabel remembered seeing in Edinburgh when she had first spotted Tom and Angie.

She nosed her green Swedish car into position behind Joe and Mimi’s car and stopped the engine.

Jamie, still in the car, looked round. “Yes,” he said. “This is it.”

“What?” asked Isabel. “What’s it?”

“It’s the place I wanted to be this weekend,” said Jamie. “It’s exactly what I wanted.”

Isabel was not sure what to say. “Good,” she said at last.

“You see,” Jamie continued, struggling to release his seat belt, “I’ve never been invited to a house party. Not once. I almost went a few years ago when some friends rented a cottage up near Aviemore for a weekend, but they miscalculated the numbers and two of us had to drop out. There were strict limits on the number of people who were allowed to stay, and so I didn’t go. That was my house party.”

Isabel laughed at this. She thought for a moment: This is where it shows, those years between us. He’s excited. And was she? She had been to house parties before—there was nothing new in that from her point of view. But was there something else? Yes, she did feel it. She felt an anticipation, especially when she thought of what Jamie had said. This was something special for him; not just being here, but being here with her.

Could she dare to think that?

They got out of the car. Jamie took both cases out of the back of the car—he had only a small weekend bag—and they 1 8 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h walked over the gravel towards the door. Isabel looked up at the house, which seemed much taller when one was right up against it like this. These Scottish houses were really towers, small castles, and they must have seemed impregnable to their attackers. Of course there was always the possibility of a siege; it was all very well being behind three feet of solid stone, but food had to be brought in from somewhere. And then there was fire, and disease, and all the other hazards of having something to defend in lawless times.

Tom appeared as they reached the front door. “I was watching you from one of those little slots in the wall,” he said. “Very useful, those. I can look all the way down the drive and see who’s coming up to lay siege to me.”

Isabel smiled at the joke, but then the thought came to her: What if the threat is already inside? Tom noticed how her expression changed suddenly, and he said, “Everything all right?”

“Yes,” said Isabel quickly. “Yes. It is.”

“Good,” said Tom. He glanced over his shoulder—they were standing in the hall, and he looked towards a back door. “There’s somebody who looks after us here. She comes with the house.

Mrs. Paterson. She’s made up your rooms and will show you to them.”

Mrs. Paterson appeared, emerging from the doorway behind Tom. She was a middle-aged woman with a broad, weather-beaten face—the sort of face, thought Isabel, that one doesn’t see in towns any more, where pallor reigns. She greeted Isabel and Jamie courteously in a Border accent and indicated for them to come upstairs.

They followed her into a corridor. “You’ve not been in this house before?” she asked.

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“I visited the garden once,” said Isabel. “Some years ago.

But not the house itself.”

“Oh, aye,” said Mrs. Paterson. “I remember that. An awful lot of folk came out from Peebles to see the gardens. They should open them again some time. But I think that people who rent the house don’t always like it. They want privacy—and who can blame them?”

“That’s reasonable enough,” said Isabel. “I’m not sure if I would want people traipsing through my garden, such as it is.”

Mrs. Paterson made a sound that seemed like agreement.

The corridor ran the length of the house, but because of the square shape of the house, it was not particularly long. Now they were at the end of it, outside a door of light, stripped pine, which Mrs. Paterson pushed open. “Your room,” she said to Isabel.

She went in. Jamie stayed outside.

“You can come in too,” said Mrs. Paterson, turning to Jamie.

“Your room is next door. Through here.” She pointed to an inter-connecting door.

Jamie came in, looking embarrassed, thought Isabel. She turned away. It was a large room, with painted wood wainscot-ing around the walls and two windows. The floor was wooden, with wide, old boards, and there were faded Oriental rugs here and there. An ancient wardrobe, oak and irregular, stood against a far wall and there was some sort of chest of drawers opposite it. On the walls there were small, dark oil paintings of inde-terminate country subjects: a hare at the edge of a field; stooks of wheat in a field; a winter landscape. There was a large double bed.

“I hope everything is all right,” said Mrs. Paterson. “If you 1 8 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h need to make tea or coffee or anything, the kitchen’s off the hall you came in. You’ll find everything you need there, even if I’m not around. And there’s a bathroom two doors down the hall—

we passed it. The hot-water pipes make a noise, but there’s lots of hot water, all the time.” She turned, smiled briefly at Isabel, and then left.

Isabel put her case down on the floor. Jamie had taken his case through to his room and had reappeared at the doorway between the two rooms. Now he moved over to her window and looked out.

“There’s a rooks’ nest in that tree,” he said. “Look at them.”

Isabel glanced at the tree. “It looks as if we’re sharing a bathroom,” she said.

Jamie looked round. “Fine,” he said. He returned to the window. “We could be a hundred miles from Edinburgh out here. We could be in Argyll. It’s amazing. Forty-five minutes from town.”

She joined him at the window. She looked out. Behind the trees, the hill rose up sharply, green on the lower slopes and then, as the heather took over, purple and purple-red. Sub specie aeternitatis, she thought: In the context of eternity, this is nothing, as are all our human affairs. In the context of eternity, our anxieties, our doubts, are little things, of no significance. Or, as Herrick put it, rosebuds were there to be gathered, because really, she thought, there was no proof of life beyond this one; and all that mattered, therefore, was that happiness and love should have their chance, their brief chance, in this life, before annihilation and the nothingness to which we were all undoubtedly heading, even our sun, which was itself destined for collapse and extinction, signifying the end of the party for who-soever was left.

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But she knew, even as she thought this, that we cannot lead our lives as if nothing really mattered. Our concerns might be small things, but they loomed large to us. The crushing underfoot of an ants’ nest was nothing to us, but to the ants it was a cataclysmic disaster: the ruination of a city, the laying waste of a continent. There were worlds within worlds, and each will have within its confines values and meaning. It may not really matter to the world at large, thought Isabel, that I should feel happy rather than sad, but it matters to me, and the fact that it matters matters.

She decided to stop dwelling on that, because that was a question of meaning and philosophy, and philosophy and its concerns seemed so far away here.

C H A P T E R S I X T E E N

E

THEY DID NOT SEE Joe and Mimi until they all met before dinner in the drawing room on the ground floor. This room had been sited without thought to the sun, and was north-facing, but there was a log fire in the grate—even in summer—which took the chill out of the thick stone walls. It was perfectly square, with a moulded ceiling displaying a cornucopia at each corner and four angelic heads about the central light. The furniture was right for the house—falling short of grandeur, but amounting to more than that which one might expect in a farm-house, even a prosperous one. There was a cabinet of china, a revolving bookcase, a thin-legged walnut bureau, commodious sofas, silk cushions with chinoiserie motifs, pictures of dogs and children; the accoutrements, Isabel noted, of the Scottish country gentry. On the outer wall was what must have been the largest window in the house, under which there was an enticing window seat and a low table of glossy magazines of a rural nature, Country Life, Scottish Field, Horse & Hound.

Isabel imagined how quickly one might slip into such a life, content with the small rhythms, impervious to the strife and anxiety of the outside world. And could one be happy in such a 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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life if one came from outside? She suspected that one could—

and many were. One might be like Horace, perhaps, leaving Rome for the consolations of his Sabine farm: the making of wine; the writing of poetry; the anticipation of the harvest. But, of course, it meant that one was entirely isolated from the life of the majority of one’s fellow citizens: a life of worry over all the things that people had to worry about—crime, money, noisy neighbours. It was better, she thought, to be of this world than to be detached from it.

She glanced at Tom, who was standing near the drinks trolley with Joe, engaged in conversation, forgetting for a moment Angie’s request that he serve the Martinis that she and Mimi had asked for. She wondered why they had chosen to come here, into this world so far from Dallas. It was summer in Texas, and Dallas was impossibly hot, but they came from an air-conditioned world, did they not? They might not wish to remain inside, of course, and then there was the sheer romance of Scotland, this soft, enchanting landscape with its pastel greens and blues and its cool air. That was what they wanted; or what he wanted; she was not so sure about Angie, about whether she fitted in. She’s more London, Isabel thought: Bond Street, Mayfair, the highly refined and expensive pleasures.

Tom gestured to the drinks trolley and detached himself from Joe. He had seen across the room, as Isabel had, the sign from Angie, a mime of a glass tilted to the lips; not as discreet, she thought, as the signs she had heard the Queen gave to her staff: a slight twisting of a hand which would swiftly bring a gin and tonic, part of an elaborate and tactful system of communi-cation that enabled life to proceed. She had heard, too, that the Queen liked to eat banana sandwiches, and that staff were trained to make such sandwiches in just the right way; an 1 9 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h endearing touch to a public life, she thought, human simplicity in the midst of state fuss.

Tom brought Isabel’s drink over to her and stayed to talk.

She had worked out, now, how to look at him without having her eyes drawn to the painfully lop-sided face and to the grimace which Bell’s palsy produced. By looking at the eyes, or just above them, the rest of the face became less important.

“I’m sorry about this face of mine,” he said suddenly. “I know that it’s hard for people.” Isabel opened her mouth to protest, but he continued. “It looks very uncomfortable, you know, but it isn’t. I’m aware of it, there’s a certain muscular strain, but after a while it’s nothing much. And I count myself lucky it’s not worse.”

“Of course,” she said quickly. “And, really, it’s nothing . . .”

He laughed. “It’s not nothing. It certainly isn’t. I can’t bring myself to look at my photograph, you know. I say to myself, ‘Oh no, that’s not me, is it? I don’t look quite that bad.’ But then I gather that there are lots of people who can’t stand looking at their own photograph, who prefer not to be seen. Probably most people, if it comes down to it.”

“I’m one,” said Isabel.

Tom looked surprised. “But you . . . Well, I would have thought that you would be proud of how you looked. Surely you don’t have to worry.”

“You’re very kind, but I do. I’ve always thought that I’m too tall, for a start.”

“Nonsense. Tall women are really attractive. I much prefer tall women.”

Isabel glanced at Angie. She did not think about it, but her eyes flicked over, and then she looked back at Tom again, quickly, realising what she had done. Angie was not tall.

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If Tom had noticed, he was too polite to let it show. “Tell me,” he said, “do you like living in Edinburgh?”

Isabel felt a momentary irritation with him over this question. It was something one should not ask another, because it was either mundane to the extent of pointlessness, or tactless. If somebody did not like living where they lived, then that meant that they were trapped, either by marriage or some other domestic circumstance, or by a job, or by sheer inertia. Whatever the reason, if the answer to this was no, the background to that answer would be one of regret.

And there was another side to it. She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not. And here was Isabel, half-American, and therefore in a position, one might assume, to live in America, living, instead, in Scotland.

Was Tom one of those Americans? she asked herself.

“Of course I like it,” she said. She hoped that her answer had not revealed her irritation, but she decided that it probably had, as he drew back slightly. She reached out to touch him. “Sorry. That sounds rather defensive. I do like it. But I’d be happy living in other places, I suspect. New York. Charlottes-ville, Virginia. To name just two. I’m sure I’d be happy there.”

Her reply had the desired effect. “You might have thought that I was implying it was an odd decision to live in Edinburgh,”

he said. “Anything but. I’d love to live somewhere like that.”

“Well, let me ask you, then, are you happy living in Dallas?

Or even, why do you live in Dallas?”

His reply came quickly. “Because I’m from there, which is the reason most people live where they live, isn’t it? Isn’t that so all over the world?”

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“It probably is. Most people don’t choose to be where they are. They’re just there.” She paused. “But what about my other question? Are you happy there?”

This time his answer was slower in coming. He stared down into his glass, and Isabel knew that she should not have asked him.

“I’m sure you are,” she said, before he could answer. “And I can understand why. It’s comfortable. It’s safe. There are things to keep you busy. Your friends are there.” She knew, though, that true as those factors might have been, they were outranked by something else. And that, she thought, is not the usual thing—

an unhappy marriage; it was that less common phenomenon—

an unhappy engagement.

They talked about other things. He asked her about Scotland, and she realised that he had read widely on Scottish history, more widely, perhaps, than she had. One could not do everything, she thought defensively; it was difficult enough keeping up with what was being written in her branch of philosophy, let alone in other areas.

She looked over to the other side of the room, where Joe and Mimi were standing with Angie and Jamie. Mimi was saying something to Angie, and Joe, she saw, was staring at the picture above the fireplace. He did not look bored—he was too polite for that—but Isabel could not help smiling at Joe’s expression. He looked as he did when he wanted to be elsewhere: slightly bemused. And he would have stood through many pre-dinner conversations with Dallas women, thought Isabel, and he would have been scrupulously courteous through all of them.

Angie, she saw, was studying her glass as Mimi spoke 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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then, just briefly, she looked at Jamie, sideways—away from Mimi, but Isabel noticed.

“So,” said Tom. “What do you think about that? I’d be interested to hear your views, since you live here.”

Isabel had not heard the question. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was away with the fairies.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. That’s a Scottish expression. It means that my thoughts were elsewhere. People used to talk a lot about the fairies in Scotland, especially in the Highlands. You probably wondered what I was going on about.”

She saw his mouth shift, almost painfully, but she realised, from his eyes that he was smiling. “One would be careful about that expression back home,” he said. “It might be misunder-stood.”

“Of course,” said Isabel. “Two countries separated by the same language.”

They lapsed into silence. Isabel was aware that he was staring at her, as if studying her, and she looked away in her embarrassment. Mimi had turned to Joe and he was saying something to her; Angie was now facing Jamie and was looking up at him.

There was no mistaking her interest, Isabel decided; the body language was too obvious. She felt a pang of jealousy, primitive and acute, but then she thought: That is how any woman would be in the presence of Jamie. It could be expected from anybody, but certainly from somebody like Angie, who was obviously interested in men. She was a woman who would appreciate male beauty—of course she would—and she would not have met anybody like Jamie before, with his gentleness, that special Scottish gentleness. Texan men were not usually like that. But, 1 9 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h but . . . she imagined herself facing Angie and saying, Sorry, he’s mine, you know; he’s not available. Sorry.

Angie suddenly looked at her watch and announced, so that all might hear, that dinner would spoil if they did not go through.

Tom put down his glass. He nodded to Isabel and crossed the room to whisper something to Angie. Isabel watched Angie’s expression. It changed, and then changed again as she listened to Tom. And what human emotions, she wondered, were written there? Boredom. Duty. Frustration. She paused. And resentment? Yes. Resentment that the wrong man was at her side.

For a moment Isabel felt sympathy for Angie. There were so many women—and, one might assume, men—for whom that could be said. So many of us had the wrong person at our side, and lived a life of regret at the fact. Loyalty kept people together—loyalty, and money, and sheer emotional inertia. But then, these were relationships which started with optimism and love and conviction that they were right. This, by contrast, was one which was starting, Isabel thought, through calculated greed and social ambition. And that, she felt, was undeserving of a great deal of sympathy. Angie should get out of it now. She should be honest with herself, admit her motives, and then say goodbye to Tom and to her ill-placed ambitions. But she has no intention of doing that, thought Isabel. She has something very different in mind.

A F T E R D I N N E R they returned to the drawing room. Somebody had put more wood on the fire—the housekeeper, perhaps—

and the flames were high, throwing dancing light on the dark Belouchi rug in front of the hearth. Coffee cups, small bone-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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china cans, were set out on a tray, with bitter chocolate mints to one side.

There was brief, inconsequential conversation, and then Isabel and Jamie went to the piano.

“Something Scottish,” said Tom. “Please. Something Scottish.”

Isabel nodded in his direction, then turned to Jamie as she sat on the piano stool. “Sing for your supper?”

“No alternative,” muttered Jamie. But he was incapable of being churlish, and he smiled encouragingly as she opened the book of Scottish songs and put it on the piano.

Isabel pointed at the music and Jamie nodded. “Very suitable,” he said.

“ ‘The Bonnie Earl of Moray,’ ” Isabel announced. “This is not exactly a cheerful song—sorry about that—but it’s rather haunting, in its way. In fact, it’s a lament, and a lot of Scottish music is about how things have gone wrong, about what might have been if things had turned out a bit better.”

Mimi laughed at this. “Isn’t that the same as country and western?” she asked. “All those songs about unfaithful women and faithful dogs.”

“Perhaps,” said Isabel. She played a few chords and turned to Jamie, who nodded. He stood by the piano, ready to sing.

When they reached the end of the song, and the last notes of the piano accompaniment, Mimi clasped her hands together, as if to clap, but did not, because everybody else was silent.

Angie was staring at Jamie, and Tom, who had been watching Isabel’s hands on the keyboard, was now looking at Angie. Joe had his hands folded on his lap and was looking at the ceiling, at one of the plaster cornucopias.

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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 broke the silence. “The bonnie earl of Moray was murdered, alas,” she said. “The earl of Huntly slayed him, and then laid him on the green, as the words have it.”

“It’s very sad,” muttered Angie. “Very sad . . . very sad for his family.”

Jamie caught Isabel’s eye. He was daring her to laugh, but she looked down at the keys of the piano, and depressed one, a B-flat, gently, not enough for it to sound.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “He was a much-loved man, I believe.

And there’s a line there, you know, which is very intriguing. He was a braw gallant, and he played at the glove. Apparently that means that he played real tennis—not lawn tennis, but real tennis. That’s the game with those strange racquets and the ball that you hit off the roof. At first they played it by hitting the ball with their hands. Then they started to use a glove. Racquets came much later. There’s still a real tennis court at Falkland Palace.”

“We went there,” said Tom, “didn’t we, Angie? Over on the way to St. Andrews. Falkland Palace. There was an orchard—

remember?—and that peculiar tennis court was there. That’s where James V died, just after Mary, Queen of Scots, was born.

Remember? He just turned his face to the wall and died because he thought that everything was lost. They told us about it—that woman who showed us around.”

Angie frowned. She looked confused. “Which woman?”

Jamie came to her rescue. “I’d like to sing another song,” he said. “This is by Robert Burns, and is one which you all will know. ‘My love is like a red, red rose.’ ”

While Isabel paged through the book, Tom said, “That’s a beautiful song. Really beautiful.” He was sitting next to Angie on the sofa near the fire and now, as Isabel played the first bars 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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of the introduction, he took Angie’s hand in his. Isabel, half watching, half attending to the printed music, thought it was possible that Tom knew exactly what Angie had in mind when she accepted his offer of marriage, but had decided that she might grow to love him because love can come if you believe in it and behave as if it exists. That was the case, too, with free will; with, perhaps, faith of any sort; and love was a sort of faith, was it not?

But then she glanced at Angie, and she changed her mind again. She would prefer him not to be around, she thought. That is when she would love him. She would love him much more then.

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

E

SHE AWOKE in the small hours of the morning, barely three, and heard him breathing beside her, that quiet, vulnerable sound, so human. Her pillow had slipped off the side of the bed and her head was against a ruffled undersheet. She was turned away from him; away, too, from the window through which the dim light of a sky that was never truly dark in the summer made its way through the gaps in the curtains. She was immediately wide awake, her mind clear, but she closed her eyes and drew the sheet up. It was warm; there was no need of blankets in that still air.

She went over what had happened. After the music the evening had come to an end. Mimi had been tired and said that she and Joe would go upstairs; Angie had looked at her watch and said that she, too, wanted to go to bed. Jamie had said, “I’m going to have a walk outside. Isabel? What about you?”

It was not an invitation that included Tom, and Isabel felt embarrassed, but then she thought that Tom would imagine he had been spoken for by Angie, who had declared that she was heading for bed. She said goodnight to Angie and saw that 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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other woman was looking at Jamie, and then at her, and was smiling. For a moment she wondered whether she knew what Isabel felt for him. Mimi had divined it; perhaps it was glaringly obvious.

She and Jamie had gone out together. It was half past ten and there was still enough light to see the details of the trees that clung to the side of the hills. And they could see, too, the sheep still grazing beside the dry-stane dyke that intersected the field at the bottom of the slope. There was a path that ran off the driveway beside the rhododendrons, which they had followed, Jamie leading, gravel underfoot, and twigs, too, pine nee-dles, cones.

She had shivered, not because it was cold—it was not, and she did not feel the need of a coat—but because she was with Jamie and she felt that she would have to speak to him now, before they went any further. He could hardly have forgotten about their room; had he thought about what might happen?

“Jamie.”

He was a few paces ahead of her on the path. Somewhere, not far away, there was a small burn descending from the hill above; there was the sound of water.

He turned round and smiled at her. “What an odd evening,”

he said.

She looked up at him. It was not all that odd; different, perhaps, from evenings they had spent together in Edinburgh, but not odd.

“Don’t you think that we should talk?” she said. Her voice had a catch in it, out of nervousness, and she thought: I sound petulant. A philosopher in the countryside, where talking was not always necessary.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He looked surprised. “We’ve been talking all night, haven’t we?” He paused, and his smile now was conspiratorial, as if he was about to confess a suppressed thought. “Or, should I say, Angie was. Did you hear her at your end of the table? That woman can talk. I hardly had to say anything.”

No, thought Isabel, not that. “I didn’t mean that. I meant that we should talk about what seems to be happening between us.”

He was standing very close to a branch of a pine tree that had grown across the path, almost obstructing it. Somebody else had snapped off part of it and the pieces lay at the side of the path. He suddenly reached up and broke off a twig. It was something for his hands to do, something to mask the awkwardness of the moment.

He hesitated for a while before replying. “I’m not sure that anything’s happening between us,” he said eventually. “Or nothing that wasn’t happening before.”

He seemed to be searching her face for a clue, and, watching him, Isabel felt a momentary impatience. He was not a sixteen-year-old boy. He was twenty-something. He had had affairs. He knew.

“Look,” she said. “Do you mind if I put it simply? Do you want to sleep with me? Do you?”

His eyes were downcast, looking at the path, at the litter of pine cones. Her words were hanging in the air, with the sharp scent of the pine cones and the sound of the burn somewhere near. I’ve shocked him, she thought; and she was secretly appalled.

He shrugged. “I . . .”

“You don’t have to.”

“No. I want to.”

“Yes?”

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“Yes. I said yes. Yes.”

They went back.

S H E T H O U G H T: How beautiful he is lying there. I have never seen anything as beautiful, never, than this young man, with his smooth skin and there, just visible, the shape of his ribs. I can place my hand there, against his chest, and feel the human heart beating.

He opened his eyes.

“You’re awake too.” She moved her hand upwards to rest against the side of his face. You are mine entirely, she thought; now, at this moment, you are mine entirely, but you will not be for long, Jamie, because I do not possess you. Oh my darling, darling Jamie, I wish I could possess you, but now, more than ever, I do not.

“Oh,” he said. That was all: “Oh.” And then, turning his head so that he looked into her eyes, he said, “I’m very sorry, Isabel.”

“Sorry?” She touched his cheek again. “Why say that? You don’t have to be sorry for anything.”

“I rather . . . rather rushed things. Maybe you didn’t want . . .”

She was surprised, and drew in her breath. Rushed?

He lifted his head and rested it against his hand, elbow-propped. “Have I upset you?” he asked.

“Of course not. Of course you haven’t upset me, Jamie.

Dear Jamie. No. Not at all.”

“Then . . .”

She could not help but feast upon the sight of him: such perfection, clean—like a boy—with no spare flesh.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Then she whispered, “Of course you didn’t. Don’t be so silly.

I was hoping . . . Yes, I was, I suppose. I hoped that this might happen.”

She watched him as he thought about this.

“I’m very fond of you,” he said.

“I know that.”

He lay back again and looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll never forget this. This.”

“And neither shall I. Never. Not a kiss nor look be lost. ”

“That poem?”

She nodded. “That most gravely beautiful of poems. I told you about it before.” She would remember, too, with each memory folded and put away, like much-loved clothing in a drawer.

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

E

TOM DID NOT SURPRISE ISABEL. She had not imagined that he would be one to sit inside and read, and he was not. Eti-quette required that guests should not be forced to participate in activities that might not be to their taste. The possibility of a walk after breakfast was raised, “but people might want to do something completely different,” Tom said quickly; what that was would be left to them. What, Isabel wondered, was completely different from a walk; only an activity that involved immobility would be completely different, and could immobility be an activity? It was a state, surely. She caught Jamie’s eye over the breakfast table; he was sitting opposite her. The breakfast table, she reflected, was the test: regret, shame, the desire to forget—such were the emotions which might emerge in circumstances like these, but they hadn’t. Things had changed between her and Jamie—of course they had—but there were none of those feelings as they sat at breakfast, only a warm fondness, something close to euphoria, or that is what Isabel felt.

“I’m going to go up the hill,” said Tom, looking out the window at the cloudless sky. “It’s about two hours there and back.”

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“And there are great views up at the top,” said Angie. “You look out and you can see all the way down to . . .” She trailed off.

“You might be able to see the Eildons in the distance,” said Jamie, adding, “maybe.”

“You can,” said Tom. “Walter Scott country. And Edinburgh too—a sort of smudge in the distance.”

“Edinburgh is not a smudge,” said Isabel.

Tom smiled, and bowed his head. “Of course not. How rude of me.”

Angie looked at her watch. “I’ll walk tomorrow,” she said. “I want to go into Peebles.”

Tom looked at her. Isabel noticed that he did not seem disappointed, but then a walk was a small thing.

“Isabel?” Tom said. “Are you coming for a walk? Jamie?”

Jamie looked across the table at Isabel. He was answering Tom, but looking at her. “Do you mind if I don’t?” He gave no reason.

“Why not come to Peebles with me?” said Angie quickly. “I need somebody to help me carry heavy things. That is, if you don’t mind . . .”

Jamie smiled. “I don’t. Not at all.”

Tom turned sharply. It seemed that he was going to say something to Angie, but he apparently thought better of it.

Isabel wondered whether he was feeling annoyed about Angie’s shopping sprees; heavy purchases sounded ominous and expensive. Another racehorse? Or a large bronze bust from an antique shop? She imagined Jamie staggering under the weight of a bust of Sir Walter Scott, trailing behind Angie through the streets of Peebles. But then she wondered if it was not resentment of Angie’s shopping, but jealousy of her time and company. She 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 declined to go on a walk with him and had invited Jamie to go to town with her instead, rather quickly, Isabel thought. Any man who saw his fiancée taking such obvious delight in the company of an attractive young man must feel something, she decided; unless, of course, that man was so secure in the loyalty of the fiancée that it would not occur to him that there might be anything but innocent pleasure for her in the company of the younger man.

Joe and Mimi had their own plans. Joe, with unfailing instinct, had located an antiquarian book dealer who lived nearby and had arranged for them to visit him and have lunch at the Peebles Hydro, a vast Edwardian hotel overlooking the mouth of the Tweed Valley. The walk, then, would be done only by Isabel and Tom.

“It’s not compulsory,” said Tom. “You really don’t have to traipse up there with me if you’d prefer to stay down here.”

“I want to,” she said. And she did. Angie might be unre-warding company, but Tom was not; Isabel found him intriguing. And not the least of the interest was this: Why had he become involved with Angie? Not that she could imagine that being a subject of conversation, but light might be shed on his character during the walk, and Isabel had a distinct sense that Tom wanted to talk to her. There was something in the way in which he looked at her which suggested that there were things waiting to be said. And what, she wondered, would these be?

Nothing, she decided. You’re imagining things—again.

Jamie agreed to meet Angie in the hall in fifteen minutes and went upstairs. Isabel went too, a little later, and found Jamie struggling with the zip of a light windcheater.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h hill. “Make sure that you have something to put on up there. You know how things can change on the hills. One moment it’s summer, then it’s semi-arctic. Our delightful Scottish climate.”

She moved forward and took over the struggle with the zip, which she eased past its obstruction. Her hand remained against the front of the garment, gentle against his chest. She looked up and into his eyes. There was light in them, and she wanted only to embrace him. She did not want him to go away; she wanted him to stay. She did not want to be anywhere but with him, because now, at last, she felt a happiness so complete that it was a mystery in its own right. Simple love, she thought, not a mystery, but the vision of Eros.

He leaned forward.

“My beautiful one,” she whispered.

“Isabel.”

“My beautiful one,” she said. “Be careful of the rain.”

“You too.”

“ N OT E V E RY BODY U N D E R S TA N D S,” remarked Tom during a pause halfway up the hill. “Not everybody understands why I should feel as I do about this country. I have a brother who has no interest—none at all—in Scotland. Even when I show him the papers that spell it out—how our people came from here, their names, the places they lived. He shrugs and says, ‘A long time ago—we’re Americans now.’ How can anybody be so indifferent to the past?”

“It depends on the past,” said Isabel. “Some people find the past just too painful. What if you come from a past that is full of unhappiness and indignity? A place in Russia or Poland where 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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there have been pogroms and oppression? Would you want to be reminded of that? I’m not sure I would.”

Tom used the end of his stick to prise an encrustation of mud off his boots. “Maybe. But don’t you think that it’s breaking faith with the people who had to put up with all that—to ignore, to forget about them now? And anyway, there’s nothing like that in being from here. Our Scottish ancestors weren’t miserable.”

Isabel looked at him with incredulity. Texans, she thought, were at least realistic; did Tom not know what it was actually like? Having read as much as he seemed to have done about Scottish history, he surely could not believe that. She watched him scrape the rest of the mud off his boots and then wipe the stick clean on a clump of heather beside the path.

“I don’t know how to put this,” she said, “but those distinguished Scottish ancestors you’ve unearthed—they weren’t exactly angels, you know. They can’t have been; not if they were at all prominent. All the leading Scottish families were just a bunch of rogues. They plotted and raided and disposed of one another with utter abandon—utter abandon. The Sicilians could teach them nothing. Nothing.”

Tom stared at her, and for a moment Isabel regretted what she had said. We have to believe in something, and a belief in the goodness of the place from which one had sprung, or one’s ancestors had sprung, was one of the ways of arming oneself against the cold knowledge that it would all be over in a moment and was nothing anyway. Meaning—that’s what we need, and if it helps to be Irish or Scottish or Jewish, or anything, for that matter, then we should let people believe in these scraps of identity.

“Of course one shouldn’t make too much of it,” said Isabel.

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

“Not everybody was ruthless. There were saints too—lots of them. It’s just that it’s difficult to find many figures in Scottish history who didn’t have blood on their hands. You mentioned Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart.”

“She was wronged,” said Tom quickly. “And she didn’t kill her husband.”

“Darnley? No, there’s no evidence that she blew him up.

But since you mention him, let’s not forget that he was himself a murderer. He was in on the plot to kill Mary’s Italian secretary, wasn’t he? And when his friends came into the room he grabbed Mary and pinioned her while they dragged Rizzio away from her.

He did. That’s on the record. Which makes him a murderer.”

It was not one of Edinburgh’s most successful dinner parties, she thought. Mary Stuart had invited her guests to a room off her bedroom in the Palace of Holyrood. The guest list was small: her illegitimate brother, Lord Robert Stewart, and his wife; the Laird of Creich; Sir Arthur Erskine; and, at the other end of the table, David Rizzio. Rizzio was dressed in a gown of fur-trimmed damask, a doublet of satin, and velvet hose.

He wore a cap, too, by permission of the Queen, which was resented by those who had to remove their headgear in the presence of the monarch (everybody else, except Darnley, who was married to Mary). The loutish Scottish lords came into the room and seized Rizzio, who burst into Italian, and then French, in his desperation. Giustizia! Giustizia! Madame, sauve ma vie! She could not; she was just the half-French queen of a nation of boisterous men. They stabbed him again and again, again and again.

Tom pointed to the top of the hill, which still looked far away. Now they would have to leave the path, a glorified sheep track, as it followed the contour of the hill and they needed 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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climb. They set out, making their way slowly over low heather. A female grouse broke cover suddenly, cackling in alarm, running along the ground, head lowered, to avoid what she thought would be her murderers. Isabel looked at her in pity, and felt a sudden tenderness, brought on by love. Love paints the world, she thought, enables us to see its beauty, its vulnerability, its preciousness. If we are filled with love, we cannot hate, or destroy; there is no room for such things. She closed her eyes for a moment, a dizzying moment, and she was back in that room, with Jamie beside her and the half-light of the summer sky outside, and her heart full of that very love she felt now.

“Are you all right?” Tom had stopped and was looking at her with concern. “Tell me if this is too steep.”

She reassured him that she was fine, that she had only been thinking of something and had closed her eyes because of that.

“I’m perfectly all right with this. I walk a lot in town, you know.

I’m fit enough.”

“Not everyone can climb a hill,” said Tom. “We’re so used to our cars. Our legs . . . well, we’re forgetting how to use them. Or that’s the way it is in Dallas. I try to walk as much as I can. I have a place out near Tyler. A nice bit of land. I’ve never managed to get the house as I want it. It’s in the wrong place, but my hands are tied. I’d like to knock it down and build again, but it was left to me and my sister jointly. Her husband won’t let her agree.”

“And Angie? Does she do much walking?” asked Isabel.

Angie had not been mentioned, and this was a chance to bring her into the conversation.

“She mostly drives,” said Tom. “But she plays tennis from time to time. She’d like to do more of that when we’re married.”

“I see,” said Isabel. She looked up at the sky; the rain was 2 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h holding off, but was there in the distance, in the heavy purple clouds over East Lothian and the sea beyond. “Have you known her for long?” The question was innocent, even banal; casual conversation on a walk between two friends who wanted to get to know each other better.

“A year,” said Tom, appearing to think. Sometimes we inflate times to make things seem better for us. “Or not quite.”

“You must have a lot in common,” said Isabel.

Tom did not answer immediately. Then he said, “Some things.”

Isabel made light of this. “Well, that’s a start. You’ll develop fresh interests together, no doubt. That’s so important in marriage. Without interests in common, well, I’m not sure what the point is.” That was as far as she could go, too far perhaps. Tom just nodded. He did not say anything.

When they reached the top of the hill, the view was as Tom had said it would be. There were blue Border hills in the distance and there, in the other direction, were the Pentland Hills, with Edinburgh just beyond, Arthur’s Seat a tiny, crouching lion. They sat down to get their breath back and Isabel laid back, looking up into the empty sky. The world is in constant flux, said the Buddhists, and she thought of this as she looked into the blue void; she imagined she could see the particles in the air, the rushing, swimming movement, the passage of the winds. Nothing was empty; it only appeared to be so. And then she thought: I am in a state of bliss. I am in love. Again. Finally.

JA M I E BO U G H T Isabel a jar of honey. It had been his only purchase in Peebles; a jar of honey which he placed in her hands with a smile. “Made by bees,” he said.

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Angie was watching as he did this. Her face was impassive.

She had found an antique dealer and bought a small, marble-topped French table, which Jamie had uncomplainingly carried to the car—it had been heavy—and one of those Victorian bottles filled with coloured sand to make a striped effect.

“What’s the point of that?” Jamie had asked.

“None,” replied Angie. “It’s a bottle with sand in it.”

Tom showed a polite interest in Angie’s purchases, but Isabel could see that they meant nothing to him.

“We’re going to ship a lot of things back at the end of the summer,” he said. “Angie’s going to redecorate the house.”

Angie stared at Isabel, as if expecting her to contradict this.

“I’m sure it will be very attractive,” said Isabel. “And you’re choosing the things yourself. Some people . . .” She almost said some rich people but stopped herself in time. “Some people get decorators to choose everything for them. Furniture, paintings—the lot.”

“I couldn’t live with that sort of thing,” said Angie. “Another person’s taste.”

Isabel wondered if she was going to get rid of all of Tom’s possessions when she moved in. And she thought that he might be thinking this, too, as he began to say something but was interrupted by Mimi, who started to talk about somebody in Dallas whom they both knew who had spent a year, and a fortune, searching for old possessions that had been mistakenly thrown out. He had tracked them down eventually and taken them back to the house. “Such loyalty,” she said. “It was like old friends being reunited.”

The conversation drifted off in other directions. They were all in the drawing room, drinking tea, which Mrs. Paterson had brought in from the kitchen and placed on a sideboard. As she 2 1 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h did so, she turned to Isabel and whispered, “May I have a quick word with you, please?” She nodded briefly in the direction of the door and then left. Isabel, standing near the sideboard, took a few sips of her tea and then put down the cup and saucer and followed Mrs. Paterson.

The hall was empty, but the door that led off down the kitchen corridor was ajar. Isabel went through it and walked down the corridor. A child’s rocking horse and a small, old-fashioned pedal car had been stored in the passageway. The rocking horse, with tangled mane, was painted off-white and was scratched with use; the pedal car was British racing green, with red leather seats. Both looked dusty, as if abandoned a long time ago by the children who had once loved them. Children, like cats, made a house into a home, and the echoes of their presence lingered.

Mrs. Paterson was standing near the large kitchen window, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She turned round when Isabel came into the room.

“Thank you, Miss Dalhousie,” she said. “I couldn’t speak to you through there. And when I looked for you this morning, you had already gone.”

“Tom and I went for a walk,” she explained. “There’s a wonderful view from the top of that hill. We saw for miles and miles.”

Mrs. Paterson nodded. “Willy liked that,” she said. “My late husband. He was the factor here when this place was run as a proper estate. Though calling him the factor sounds a bit grand.

There was only one other man working here, who looked after the sheep. Willy did the forester’s job, too, because everything was so run down. Then when he died they stopped doing anyT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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thing and just let out the land to the sheep farmer down the road, and I look after the house for the owners.”

“You do a very good job,” said Isabel, looking about the well-ordered kitchen, with its rows of gleaming copper saucepans and well-blacked skillets.

“I try my best. But it’s tough work when we have the short lets. The Bruces are no trouble, because they’re here for so long.

And they’re easy people to get on with.”

Isabel nodded. “But you wanted to talk to me about something . . .”

Mrs. Paterson put down the dish towel. “I’m so embarrassed about this,” she said. “You see, Angie asked me this morning to put some bottled water in your rooms. She said that there should be a bottle in your room and one in that young man’s room too. Jamie, isn’t it? Well, I said that you were sharing now.

I didn’t think, I just said it. And she was very surprised. I thought I shouldn’t have mentioned anything. You see, when I made up the room . . .”

Isabel shook her head. “Don’t worry about that,” she said.

“It’s not important. It really isn’t.” She paused. “Being in adjoin-ing rooms proved very convenient.”

Mrs. Paterson looked up sharply. “Oh?”

Isabel shrugged. It was too late now to sidestep the issue.

“Well, I suppose I’m just telling you the truth. We have to do that, you know. I could lie to you and pretend that I was embarrassed but I wasn’t. It provoked a conversation between us, you see. And he stayed. Last night was the first time we were together.”

Mrs. Paterson made a gesture with her hand which Isabel could not interpret. Was this shock? she wondered. A gesture of 2 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h disapproval? People in Edinburgh might tolerate things which people in the more conservative Scottish countryside would not. Taking a younger lover might be just the sort of thing of which Mrs. Paterson might have a low opinion.

The older woman turned away for a moment and stared out of the window. Then she turned round again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your private affairs are none of my concern.”

“But I mentioned them to you,” said Isabel.

Mrs. Paterson nodded. “That’s true, I suppose that you did.”

She paused. “May I ask you something, Miss Dalhousie? Would you mind?”

Isabel wondered what the question might be. It was probably Jamie’s age that she was interested in finding out. “Of course you can ask me.”

“I know I’m older than you,” began Mrs. Paterson. “But . . .

but do you think that if I went to Edinburgh I might be able to find a young man like that? Do you think I’d have a chance?”

“Would you like me to help you?” asked Isabel. She burst out laughing, as did the other woman. They both knew that neither was serious, but Isabel thought, What if she said yes? How would I do it? And that question prompted another in her mind.

How on earth had she found Jamie? How had that marvellous, improbable event happened? It was luck, surely, on the same scale as winning the lottery, or any of those things that were against wild, impossible odds, but which happened from time to time and made one believe in the operation of providence.

She returned to the drawing room. Joe and Mimi had gone for a rest before dinner; the country air, Mimi said, made one feel sleepy. Isabel agreed. She could have gone to sleep, she thought, on top of the hill when she had been lying there look-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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ing at the sky. She had done that once in Ireland one summer, with John Liamor, at the end of a long walk; they had lain down exhausted in a field one evening and woken up when it was dark and the sky was filled with stars. They had both been so struck by the beauty of the experience that they had said nothing about it, and now, strangely, when she thought about it she thought of John without that bitterness that had accompanied her memories of him.

Jamie was paging through a magazine. Tom and Angie were seated on a sofa.

“Well,” said Jamie, putting down the magazine. “I’m going upstairs.”

Isabel stayed where she was. Angie, she noticed, was watching her. She could not leave the room behind him—not now.

“Dinner is at seven-thirty,” said Angie, transferring her gaze to Jamie. “Drinks at seven.”

As Jamie acknowledged the information, Isabel, who had poured herself a fresh cup of tea, fiddled with her teaspoon.

Then Angie said, “Is everything all right up there? Are you comfortable enough?”

Jamie was on the point of leaving the room. He stopped.

“Yes,” he said quickly. “Yes, it’s fine.”

“I’ll come up and check on everything,” said Angie. “I’ve left the arrangements to Mrs. Paterson, but I should see that everything’s all right.”

Jamie threw a glance at Isabel, and she looked at him helplessly.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Mrs. Paterson has looked after us very well.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Very well. You’re lucky to have her.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Angie looked at Isabel, but only for a moment before she turned away, as if Isabel’s intervention was hardly worth noticing.

She put down her cup and rose to her feet. “I’ll come with you.”

Tom appeared uninterested in this conversation. He said to Isabel, “Do you know the Falls of Clyde?”

“The Falls of Clyde?” She was thinking of what Angie might do when she went upstairs. Did it matter at all that she had been told that her guests, whom she thought were merely ac-quainted, were occupying the same room? What business was it of hers? None, Isabel decided. In fact, it would probably do her good to be reminded of this, as it might lessen the eyeing up of Jamie which was going on. Was Tom completely unaware of that? Had he not noticed?

Jamie left the room, with Angie just behind him. Poor Jamie, thought Isabel. He’s embarrassed about this. I have no need to feel awkward, but it must be different for him. She thought of the reason for this. It was the way that people looked at these things—from the outside. The younger man was seen as being used. Always. That’s the way people thought.

She was not using him. And she would not hold on to him; she knew that there would come a time when one of them would need to let go—and it would be him. When that time came she would not stop him. But it was not yet. And it did not matter what the world thought of her. If people wanted to talk of cradle-snatching, they were welcome to do so.

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

E

ON MONDAY, back in Edinburgh, she spent three hours at her desk and made a good dent in the submissions pile. There was an awkward letter to deal with, too, which took almost an hour: a letter from a member of the editorial board expressing concern about the direction the Review was taking. Since they had appointed this new member, a young professor from the University of British Columbia, he had written to Isabel four times. Normally she did not hear from the members of the editorial board, some of whom she suspected were only dimly aware that they were members and who never raised any issues.

But this professor took his membership seriously and had a keen eye for what he saw as deviations from the main purpose of the journal. We are a journal of applied ethics, he wrote to Isabel. There are plenty of journals that cover moral theory— our job is to look at the application of ethics to concrete situations: the real problems of real people doing real jobs.

At his suggestion they had devoted an entire issue to lifeboat ethics. The discussion had been concerned with the deci-sions that one had to make in a lifeboat about who was allowed in and who should remain on the sinking ship if there were not 2 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h enough seats. And then, once the lifeboat was launched and began to ride too low in the water, who would be thrown out.

Should the oldest go first? How would one choose between the loafer and the hard-working doctor? And what if the people in the boat became really hungry and had no alternative but to eat one of their number?

Highly unlikely, another member of the editorial board had written to Isabel. Should we not concentrate on the problems of the real world?

And Isabel had replied:

I’m sorry to have to take issue with you on this, but I assure you that these questions have arisen in the real world. The case of the Mignonette was very well documented, and it is just one example. A small group of sailors was shipwrecked and found themselves in a lifeboat with the cabin boy. They drifted around for some time, becoming hungrier and hungrier, and eventually, in sheer desperation, two of them decided to kill and eat the cabin boy. This they did, and then, as luck would have it, help steamed over the horizon. The sailors were taken back to England and charged with murder. They argued that they were driven to do what they did through sheer necessity, but the criminal courts took a different view and they were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Fortunately they were not hanged, and had to serve only short prison sentences. That happened.

This had drawn a swift response. You said “fortunately” they were not hanged, wrote her correspondent. Aren’t you justifying murder? By what principle can I kill an innocent person to save my own life?

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I am not saying that, Isabel replied. I said that it was fortunate that they were not hanged because I have a very strong objection to the death penalty. Killing another as a punishment is an act of barbarism. It’s as simple as that. And it also shows a terrible lack of forgiveness. That is why I said that it was fortunate that those two men were not hanged.

The reply came. I see. I stand corrected. But the point remains: Can you kill another to save your life even if your victim is not responsible for creating the threat to your life in the first place? That’s the question.

The lifeboat issue had grown, and had eventually become two issues of the Review. And the focus moved from real lifeboats, which were, fortunately, manned by sailors rather than by philosophers, to the earth as lifeboat, which it was, in a way.

And here the issues became very much ones of the real world, Isabel thought, because real people did die every day, in very large numbers, because the resources of the lifeboat were not fairly distributed. And if we might feel squeamish about throwing a real and immediate person out of a real lifeboat, then we had fewer compunctions about doing those things which had exactly that effect, somewhere far off, on people whom we did not know and could not name. It was relentless and harrowing—

if one ever came round to thinking about it—but most of our luxuries were purchased at the expense of somebody’s suffering and deprivation elsewhere.

She stopped work at twelve. The house was quiet, as Grace had the day off and Joe and Mimi were not due back from Tarwhinn House until that evening, having spent an extra night there. Isabel had returned with Jamie late on Sunday afternoon, driving back to Edinburgh in her green Swedish car in silence.

It was not an awkward silence, though; neither, it seemed, felt 2 2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the need to talk. Jamie had reached across and touched her lightly on the arm, and smiled, and she had smiled back at him; everything that they wished to say had been said earlier that weekend and it was as if they were replete.

But now Isabel felt restless. She could stay and have lunch in the house, but she did not relish the thought of sitting there by herself. What she wanted to do was to phone Jamie, just to hear his voice, but she could not do that as he was in rehearsals all day. And she thought, too, that it would be the wrong thing to do. She should not appear too keen . . . She stopped, and smiled. When had she last thought like this? Fifteen, sixteen—

the age at which one spent hours pondering the reactions of boys to one’s tactics. No, of course it was different; this was mature reflection, this was realism. Jamie would not want to feel crowded, and she would not crowd him.

She decided that she would have lunch at Cat’s delicatessen. It was often quiet during Monday lunchtime for some reason, and she was sure to find at least one of the tables free.

And she could offer to lend a hand in the early afternoon if Cat wanted a break; when she had run the delicatessen while Cat had been in Italy she had developed a taste for it and was happy now to help out when she had the time. Of course, Cat’s new employee, Miranda, might be there, so there might be no need.

Miranda was there, standing behind the counter serving a customer while Eddie sliced ham with the electric slicer. He looked up and Isabel’s blood ran cold; she hated that slicer, with its whirring circular blade, and she cringed each time she saw it.

It had the same effect on her as the sound of chalk on a black-board will have on others, or pumice stone on the surface of a bath: a chilling, nerve-wrangling effect. Eddie should not take his eyes off the ham, he should not; although the slicer had a 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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protective device which meant that it would be difficult to remove a whole finger, it could still remove a top if one were not careful. She winced. When she was young there had been a butcher in Morningside Road who, as was common with butchers in those days, had cut off two fingers. He used to amuse children by placing the stub of one of them into his ear, or occasionally at the entrance to a nostril, and this caused boys to laugh with delight and girls to squeal with horror and disgust.

There were no butchers like that any more; a lesson, somewhere, had been learned; the state had intervened.

Isabel pointed to the slicer and grimaced. “Careful,” she mouthed.

Eddie smiled and returned to his work, sending shavings of Parma ham down onto a square of greaseproof paper below. The customer whom he was serving watched the process intently.

When she had finished serving the customer, Miranda came over to the table where Isabel had sat down and greeted her warmly.

“I’ve worked here two days already,” she said. “And it’s great.

Cat’s a great boss, and Eddie’s a sweetie, he really is.” She lowered her voice. “At first I thought that there was something wrong with him, I really did. Then I think he realised that I wasn’t going to bite his head off and he was really nice to me.

He showed me where everything is and he . . . Well, he was just very helpful.”

“He’s a bit shy,” said Isabel. “But we like him very much.”

“Has he got a girlfriend?” asked Miranda.

Isabel was slightly taken aback by this question. Was Miranda interested in Eddie? That seemed a bit unlikely; she could hardly imagine Eddie with this outgoing Australian, but then perhaps that was what Eddie needed—a girl who would make 2 2 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the first move. She could not imagine his making the first move, or indeed any move. Or was there another reason for the question: a veiled enquiry as to whether Eddie was interested in girls at all?

Isabel glanced across the room. Eddie had finished with the ham and was busy measuring out stoned black olives into a small white tub. She had felt that she had got to know Eddie better when they had worked together, but when she asked herself what she knew about him—about what he did in his spare time, about who his friends were—she came to the realisation that it was very little. He sometimes went to the cinema on Lothian Road—he had mentioned that once or twice—and there was a band that he liked to follow—Isabel could not remember its name and had called it the Something Somethings when she had asked him about it. But that was all she knew about him; that, and the fact that there had been some traumatic incident some time ago. She would not tell Miranda about that, though, as it had nothing to do with her.

“I don’t know about girlfriends,” she said quietly. “He doesn’t talk about his private life. And I don’t think that he likes us to ask.”

Miranda looked thoughtful. “That’s what he needs,” she said. “He needs a girlfriend to give him confidence.”

“It may not be so simple,” Isabel objected.

Miranda looked over her shoulder to check that nobody was waiting at the till. “Every boy needs a girlfriend—or a boyfriend, depending, you know.”

Isabel nodded. “Having somebody else is important.” She looked at Miranda, at the fresh, open face, at the optimistic expression. That was what she liked about Australia and Australians; there was no angst, no complaining, just a positive 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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pleasure in living. And there was such friendliness, too, embodied in that rough-edged doctrine of mateship that they liked to talk about. That had even found its way into the Australian Philosophical Review, where Isabel had found a curious paper called “What Is Mateship?” And mateship, it appeared, was a philosophy of looking after one’s fellow man, and sharing in adversity. She had been doubtful that Australians had any monopoly on that idea, but then she had gone on to read about how mateship had saved lives in the Second World War when captured Australian servicemen coped much better with the privations of the camps because their officers had shared with the men and taken a greater interest in their welfare than had the British officers, with their insistence on separation and privilege. British officers might have something to say about that, she thought, but it was interesting. Of course, mateship had its negative side: one had to take one’s mates’ side in any argument with the authorities, which was immature, thought Isabel—she had never understood why people found such difficulty in accepting that their friends might be wrong. I am often wrong, she thought, often, and I assume my friends are too.