The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Redness in tooth and claw,” she muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  she asked quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “If they were taken over?”

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

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

  The two women were standing in the kitchen after dinner.

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

  “Yes, Patrick,” said Mimi neutrally.

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

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

  Nobody is asking me to sit in judgement on him.

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

  “No, so I hear,” said Mimi.

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

  “He’s . . .”

  “Yes,” said Mimi. “He certainly is.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A bit?” asked Mimi.

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

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

  “This was his glass, by the way.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “An obsessive,” said Isabel.

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

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

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

  she said.

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

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

  “So Cat . . .”

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

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

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

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

  Patrick and I will become friends.

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

  C H A P T E R F I V E

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  MARMITE?” asked Isabel over breakfast.

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

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

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

  “Working on your history of adoption?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  10101110000 . . .

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