The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

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

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

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

  Isabel looked down at her soup. “And?”

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

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

  “Apparently Jamie knows him too,” Grace volunteered.

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

  This was unexpected information, so Isabel again said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  erupts in somalia . . .

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

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

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

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

  “It could cost that,” she said quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

  said Isabel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  You don’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sad?” she mused.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s like . . .”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

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

  “Yes, that’s what it’s like.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Stephen Street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And the neighbours?” asked Isabel.

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

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