The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

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

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

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

  “I’d like that,” said Isabel.

  “Melbourne? Or meeting somebody?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  George’s School.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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l l S m i t h middle-of-something face. He smiled at her and gestured for her to come in. “I was about to phone you,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Or Robert Louis Stevenson,” interjected Jamie.

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

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

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

  “Because he had two feet?”

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

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

  “Very odd.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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