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. Th
ey 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.
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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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,
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