She put her coffee down on the square pine table that dominated the kitchen and sat on one of the chairs beside it.
“Jamie—” she began, but he cut her off.
“Let’s not,” he said. “Let’s not go there.”
For a moment she felt wounded. It seemed to her that he was viewing their moment of intimacy with distaste, as one would remember but decline to dissect a social solecism. And what exactly did Let’s not go there mean? Did it mean that the incident itself was not to be remembered, or that he did not wish to get emotionally involved with her? Was there a state of entanglement that he wanted to avoid? There were many rea-8 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sons why he should think that way about it, and Isabel had thought about them all. And dominating everything was the sheer brute fact that fourteen years lay between them. Fourteen years. Jamie would want a contemporary; indeed she knew which contemporary he really wanted. Cat. And Cat was her niece. Did that not make matters problematic?
And yet, and yet . . . Would anybody raise an eyebrow if a man of thirty-eight took up with a woman of twenty-four? That was a gap of fourteen years, and there were plenty of such liaisons, which people seemed to accept readily enough. How old were Levin and Kitty? That sort of thing was quite different from the real cradle-snatch, from Humbert Humbert and his Lolita. She and Jamie were two adults, one a bit older than the other, but with the same interests and the same sense of humour. Why should I not love him? she asked herself. How absurd that we should deny ourselves something when our moment of life is so brief, our very world so transitory.
And now, sitting with her coffee, in silence, she thought of Auden’s line: how rich life had been and how silly. She knew what that meant, she understood it; but the difficulty lay in trying to explain to somebody that it didn’t matter, it simply didn’t matter. Jamie did not want to take a risk. She now did. They were simply not in the same place. She was here, and he was there. That was the topography of unrequited love; there were many hills, unscalable peaks, continents separated by wide oceans of misunderstanding, of indifference.
She drained the last of her coffee, glanced at her watch and rose from her seat. She took a step forward and placed a kiss on the side of his cheek, a chaste kiss of the sort that friends give one another. She noticed that he was tense as she approached him—the body conveys so much without movement of any T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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sort—and then the tension dissolved after her kiss. “I have to go.”
He nodded. “And I have a pupil coming in”—he looked at his watch—“fifteen minutes.”
She said goodbye and made her way down the stairs. Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn’t. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place.
C H A P T E R E I G H T
E
IT WAS MIMI who suggested over breakfast that Isabel should meet their hosts before they went to spend the weekend with them. “They come into Edinburgh a lot,” she said. “And Joe and I would like to entertain them. It would be a way of returning their hospitality before the occasion, so to speak.”
Isabel agreed; it would give her an opportunity to meet Tom and Angie before she went to stay with them, which would be helpful. The meeting in the gallery, such as it was, had not been a positive one, and a relaxed meeting in a social setting could help. They could come to her house, she suggested, but Mimi objected that this would not involve Joe and her reciprocating hospitality. Isabel still thought it better. Angie had snubbed her once already, in the gallery; she could hardly do that in Isabel’s own home. “Mimi, you cook,” Isabel said. “It can be your show.
I’ll hand over the kitchen. And you’re a better cook than I am.
Far better.”
There was another reason why dinner at her house would be a good idea. She had not seen Jamie since that afternoon encounter in his flat, and she was waiting for an occasion when they could see one another in the company of other people; this T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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would make it easier. She would put it to him that she needed to make up numbers—which she did—and he would not think that she was pursuing him. Which she was not—she was definitely not pursuing him—but did she want to see him again, and soon? Yes, she did.
When she called him with the invitation, she was relieved to discover that everything seemed normal. He would be very happy to come to dinner, he said. He was having a trying week of rehearsals with a conductor who for some reason didn’t like him. Isabel privately thought that unlikely; nobody could dislike Jamie, except Cat perhaps, and that was odd, and Cat’s fault, her blind spot, her perversity.
But Jamie was sure. “He has it in for me,” he told Isabel.
“He always picks on me. Always. He says that I don’t have the dynamics quite right. He says my playing sounds feverish. What does he mean by that?”
“Con fuoco,” said Isabel. “That’s the closest I can get to it.”
“But why do you think he picks on me?” Jamie asked peevishly.
Isabel could guess. Envy. That, in her mind, was one of the commonest causes of petty behaviour like that. “He envies you,”
she said.
Jamie laughed. “Why should he envy me? He’s a successful conductor. Much in demand—for some inexplicable reason. He has no reason to envy anybody.”
At the other end of the telephone, Isabel smiled. “Do I know him?” she asked. “Describe him to me.”
Jamie gave her the name, which she did not recognise.
Then he went on, “He’s on the short side. Rather pudgy. Gets red in the face when the tempo increases. Waves his arms about.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Envy, she thought. Jamie was tall. He was good-looking. He never went red in the face. What she was tempted to say was: He wants to be you, or, perhaps, more poignantly, He wants you and cannot have you, but she could not say that. Jamie would not imagine that he could be the object of desire; it was not in his nature to think that. So she simply said, “Envy,” and left it at that.
Isabel accompanied Mimi to buy the provisions for the dinner. They walked into Bruntsfield; they could get some of the things from Cat, the others from the collection of small stores that lined Bruntsfield Place on both sides. They walked along Merchiston Crescent slowly, as if out for a stroll; Isabel was a quick walker, but not now, as Mimi stopped several times to remark on a glimpse of garden or to address remarks to cats she saw sunning themselves on low garden walls. “Paying my respects,” she said to Isabel. “This is their territory, you know.”
And Isabel saw that the cats appeared to understand this, and sidled up to Mimi, recognising their ally.
And then, on the way back, laden down with shopping bags, when they had stopped briefly at the top of East Castle Road, Mimi turned to Isabel and asked her how much she remembered of her mother. Nothing had provoked the question—it just occurred. “You were still so young when she died,” she said.
“Eleven is young. Memories of the years before that can become hazy. Unreliable even.”
“Some memories are clear enough,” said Isabel. “Walking along this street, for example. I remember that very well. I remember holding her hand and walking along here. Just as we’ve been doing.”
Mimi nodded. “I can see the two of you. I can see it.” She touched Isabel on the arm, briefly, the gesture of an older T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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cousin. “Whatever time it happens in your life—whenever it is that your parents die—you miss them, don’
t you? It’s the end of such a chapter. Two of the most important actors in the play are written out.”
“I miss her a lot,” said Isabel. “I can’t say that I think of her every day, but I think of her often. She comes into my mind, as if she’s still here. A presence.”
“As it should be,” said Mimi.
“We idealise them, don’t we?” Isabel went on, swapping her bags from hand to hand to redistribute the load. “I’ve sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to have a parent who did something really awful—what it would be like if one discovered that. I knew somebody who did, you know. The effect on her life was devastating. Everything changed for her. She was happy one moment and then the next . . .”
“What happened?”
“It was a girl I knew at university, at Cambridge. She was in my college; a rather sporty girl who played tennis, I think, and something else. She found out that her father had been seeing a prostitute. He was the chairman of a bank and this woman was blackmailing him.”
“That’s hardly unusual,” said Mimi. “And the fact that he was being blackmailed almost turns him into a victim, doesn’t it?”
They resumed their walk. “He would have been the victim of the story,” Isabel continued, “except, as they say, for one little thing. He tried to hire somebody to kill her. And he was discovered. The man he approached developed cold feet and went to the police. They wired him with a tape recorder and this gave them the evidence they needed. His trial was all over the papers, and this poor girl had to sit it out. Nobody spoke to her about it. In fact, somebody thoughtfully removed the newspa-9 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h pers from the common room on the day his conviction was reported. We all pretended it just hadn’t happened, whereas we should have talked to her about it. We should have given her some support.”
“Of course,” said Mimi. “But at that age one doesn’t want to face up to things like that. One thinks that cheerful denial is better. But I suppose it never is.”
Isabel wondered about that. She knew people who did very well on cheerful denial; rather better, she suspected, than if they faced up to the problem. Cheerful denial was certainly one way of dealing with an illness, and those who denied often fared better because optimism, and laughter, had a strong psycho-somatic effect. But this conversation was about parents. “I don’t know how I would have handled it if my parents had had affairs,” said Isabel. “Or tried to kill somebody. I think that it must be one of the most difficult things for children to handle—having affairs, that is. I know that people can’t help themselves—well, I count myself fortunate that I didn’t have that to deal with.”
Mimi was silent for a few moments. Then she said, quietly,
“No. It can’t be easy. It can’t be easy for anybody.”
They came to the top of Isabel’s street. In a garden on the corner, a large secluded square of land behind a high stone wall, the branches of a cluster of elms moved slowly in the breeze.
Behind them, the sky was clear, intersected by the vapour trail of an aircraft, heading west. Isabel pointed to the line of white, and Mimi looked up, through her large oval glasses. Isabel saw the sky reflected in the lenses, a shimmer of blue.
“One of the things I regret,” she said to Mimi as they looked up, “one of the things I regret most is never having known my sainted American mother as an adult. I suppose I would have T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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known more about her if I had. As it is, I don’t really know that much.”
Mimi let her gaze move earthwards. “Of course, that’s what you call her, isn’t it? Your sainted American mother. That’s very nice.”
“Would you be able to tell me about her?” Isabel asked suddenly. She looked at Mimi, her eyes filled with eagerness.
“Would you mind? Just tell me everything you know about her.
What sort of person she was—from the adult point of view. Was she happy? What moved her? Give me an idea of who she was.”
Mimi did not reply, and Isabel asked her again.
“Do you want the unvarnished truth?” Mimi asked.
Isabel’s expression was serious. The truth was a serious matter. “Of course I do,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell me anything but the truth, would you?”
“People sometimes don’t want to hear everything about their parents,” said Mimi. “Not everything.”
Isabel was vehement in her denial of this. She wanted to hear it all, she said. After all, it’s not as if there were any serious skeletons in the cupboard.
Mimi stopped and stared at Isabel. “But what if there were?”
Isabel’s answer came quickly. “I’d want to hear about them,”
she said. “Definitely.”
Mimi seemed unconvinced. “Are you sure?”
“Very sure. And the fact that you’ve mentioned this means that there is something.” She paused. “Tell me, Mimi. You have to tell me now.”
“I hadn’t planned to,” said Mimi, doubtfully. “It’s not . . .”
Isabel spoke gravely now. “Please. You’ve made me doubt—
not that I’m blaming you for that—but you have. You can’t stop 9 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now.” If Mimi left anything unsaid now, then it would prey on her mind. She might even wonder if her mother had tried to have somebody killed—ridiculous thought. The grocer, perhaps. Or one of her bridge four—for irresponsible bidding.
Mimi spoke evenly, in a matter-of-fact way, as a lawyer might do in addressing a court. “Your mother had an affair,” said Mimi. “She had an affair and never had the chance to confess to your father, or to make her peace with him. It was while she was having the affair that she discovered she was ill—that she was diagnosed with cancer. And by then she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. So he never found out. Or that’s what she told me. Which was better, don’t you think?” She had not understood why Hibby had had that affair. Sex? Is that all that affairs were about, or was it boredom, the sense of being trapped, the need for a form of companionship that a spouse cannot provide?
Their marriage had been a good one, Mimi had thought, and there had been no signs of an itch. But that, perhaps, was what itches were by nature: invisible.
They were halfway down the street. Isabel did not stop, but looked firmly at the pavement below her feet. The concrete was broken—the result of years of civic neglect, because this was a prosperous area and the authorities had other priorities. The well-off are never popular; they are tolerated, envied too, but not actually liked. She saw one or two places where weeds had taken hold in the cracks and had forced the surface upwards with the power of their roots. She listened to Mimi.
“And the man with whom she had this affair,” Mimi went on, “this man, who’s still around by the way—I saw him the other day, here in town—he dropped her; he dropped your mother when he heard that she was ill. That wasn’t his plan, you see. Your mother was very attractive, and it was fine to have an T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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affair with a beautiful, engaging woman, even if she was somebody else’s wife—that made it more exciting for him, I suppose.
But it was quite another thing to have an affair with a woman who was dying of breast cancer. The sick are not romantic, not really, in spite of Rodolfo and my namesake in their garret. It’s a different sort of love that puts up with illness. Old love.”
They were at Isabel’s gate now. Mimi looked anxiously at her. She wondered whether she should have told her. She had never intended to, but Isabel had insisted, and she had thought that it was the right thing to do. But now, looking at Isabel, she wondered whether it would have been better to lie.
“Should I have told you all that?” she asked, taking hold of Isabel’s arm. “Or should I have kept it from you?”
Isabel was a philosopher. She was perfectly aware that in moral philosophy it was widely agreed that paternalism was unjus
tifiable except in a very limited number of cases. We should not lie to people, and we should not keep from them the truth that they want to hear. Of course Mimi should have told her, because truth had to be told. And yet, could she ever use the expression my sainted American mother again?
She had had an affair. Well. She was human. Red-blooded.
Women had affairs all the time; only a false sense of propriety made us pretend that this did not happen; the Madame Bovary within us, she thought, within every married woman. But what about this man, the man who had treated her so shabbily? What had been the allure that had driven her mother—her sainted American mother—yes!—out of the arms of her husband and into his? At the door to the house, as she slipped the key into the lock, she turned to Mimi and asked her, “What was he like?
This other man. What was he like?”
“He was much younger than she was,” said Mimi.
C H A P T E R N I N E
E
LATER THAT DAY, Isabel stood in Rutland Square, that quiet, perfect Georgian square tucked away behind the busy end of Princes Street, under the shadow, almost, of the castle and its towering Calvinist rock. Like so many places in the city, it had its associations for her. There was the Scottish Arts Club on the other side, where she had gone to parties that had gone on into the small hours, where utterly memorable conversations had taken place, and been forgotten in spite of their brilliance; there was the corner where, during her student days, home from Cambridge, she had embraced that boy she had met in the bar at the Caledonian Hotel, that student from Aberdeen, who had met up with her a few evenings later and with whom she had enjoyed a brief flirtation; and then he had gone back to Aberdeen and she had realised that they meant nothing to each other. That was before John Liamor, about whom now, curiously, she seemed to be thinking less.
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