The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “We must remember how young he was,” said Rosalind.

  “That explains a lot, you know. These days a young man like that would be going to clubs and bars.”

  “Instead of marrying Mary, Queen of Scots,” mused Isabel.

  “Precisely,” said Rosalind, reaching for a packet of Arbo-rio rice.

  After Joe and Mimi had left for Traquair, Isabel spent several hours working in her study. Grace was in the house, but they had not spoken much that morning, as Grace had been in one of her moods. Sometimes Isabel would enquire as to the reason for the mood, and would receive a diatribe on some issue, but usually she tactfully waited for the indignation or outrage to subside. This morning she suspected that it was political, as it had been a few days ago when the morning paper had revealed the appointment by the Scottish administration of three new commissioners: one to deal with obesity, one to protect the rights of children, and another to deal with issues of access to the arts. One such commissioner would have been provocation enough to Grace; the appointment of three was insupportable. “All they want to do is to work out ways of regulating us,” she said. “But our lives are just not their business. If we want to be overweight, then that’s our affair. And as for the rights of children, what about their duties?” The conversation 1 7 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had ended at that rhetorical point, and Isabel, having only just opened her mouth, had shut it again. There would be no victory in debate with Grace; even a commissioner would come off second best in that.

  She finished her work, which was the writing of a short piece to introduce a supplement of the Review devoted to self-knowledge. It had not been easy; for some reason she had felt that the piece had become too subjective, as if she were describing her own search for self-knowledge. She printed out what she had written and read through it. She had relied on Alasdair McIntyre as a starting point. He had suggested that the unity of the self be based on the unity of a narrative that started with birth and ended with our death. In other words, we made for ourselves a coherent life story, and that life story—that narrative—enabled us to understand ourselves. But was coher-ence a goal in itself? One might pursue bad goals consistently; one might be consistently self-interested, but would that make for a form of self-knowledge that had any value at all? Isabel thought not. Self-knowledge required more than an understanding of how things work as a narrative; it required an understanding of the character traits that lead to the narrative being what it is. And for this, she concluded, we might attempt to mould our character in the future. I can be better, she thought, if I know what’s wrong with me now.

  She put the sheets of paper down and sighed. Was this really a satisfactory way of earning a living? She was not at all sure whether what she wrote would change anything for anybody; it was doubtful that somebody reading her introduction would say to himself, So that’s how it’s done! If she wanted to do that, she would be better doing anything but professional philosophy. If she wanted to change the world and the way people 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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  looked at it, then she would do far better being a journalist, who at least would be read, or a broadcaster, who might slip in little bits of advice, or a teacher, who could pour thoughts into the ears of receptive pupils. And yet if she asked any of these whether they would wish to trade their lives for hers, they would all be likely to say that they would.

  She packed, her mind still half on self-knowledge, half on the choice of clothing for the weekend. There would be walks, no doubt, and she would need something waterproof. And they might be fairly formal for dinner—Dallas people dressed smartly, she remembered, and so she would need something suitable for the evening. Angie would not dress down; she would wear a cocktail dress and there would be jewellery. She looked at her wardrobe, and felt, for a brief moment, despair. There were word people—idea people—and then there were clothes people—

  fashion people. She knew which group she belonged to.

  An hour later, her weekend case in the back of her green Swedish car, Isabel drove across town to Stockbridge to collect Jamie. It was a teaching afternoon for him, and the last of his pupils emerged from the front door of his shared stair just as Isabel drew up in her car. The boy, swinging his bassoon with the lightheartedness of one who had just finished a lesson, noticed Isabel’s car and made eye contact with her. She had seen him before, when she had come to Jamie’s flat at the end of a lesson, and they recognised each other, but he looked away again sharply. Isabel smiled; there was a certain point in the teen years, for boys, when the sheer embarrassment of being alive was too much. And this came out in the form of hostility, of grunts, of silent glowers. The world was just wrong to the teenage boy, quite wrong, and all because it failed to understand just how important that particular teenage boy was.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She extracted her telephone from her bag and dialled Jamie’s number to let him know that she was waiting for him.

  He would be two minutes, he said, and he was.

  “I recognised that boy you were teaching,” Isabel said as they set off. “I met him once before.”

  “He was nicer then, I suppose,” said Jamie. “Something’s happened to him. And his bassoon-playing.”

  “Puberty,” suggested Isabel.

  Jamie laughed. “They come out of it. One of them was horrible last year and then suddenly he started to act like a human being again. The excuses for not practising went away. The scowls. It all went.”

  Isabel turned the car into Henderson Row. She felt a sudden surge of excitement. It was Friday afternoon and she and Jamie were going off together into the country. They would be together until Sunday evening, which was the longest time she had ever spent in his company. And they had never been away before; that lent an additional spice to the moment.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this weekend,” she said. “I was feeling stale. I haven’t been out of town for ages.”

  Jamie half turned in his seat and grinned at her. Sic a smile, she thought in Scots, would melt ilka heirt—such a smile would melt any heart. “I was thinking about it all morning,” he said. “I had a deadly dull rehearsal in the Queen’s Hall. I just wanted to get out of town. To get far away from conductors and other musicians.”

  “They’ll want you to perform,” warned Isabel. “There’s a piano, I’m afraid. And I’ve brought some music.”

  “Singing with you is different,” said Jamie. “It’s . . . well, it’s casual. I enjoy it.”

  Isabel said nothing. She looked ahead at the traffic, which 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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  was light for a Friday afternoon. Sometimes one could get caught round about George Street or going up the Mound, but cars were moving freely now and she thought that it would not take them much more than an hour to get to the house, if that.

  They were heading for Peebles, to the south of Edinburgh, in roughly the same direction that Joe and Mimi had gone that morning. Tom and Angie had rented a house in a glen further to the west, a house off the normal track of visitors, but which Isabel was aware of. She had a friend who knew the owners.

  They were poor, in a genteel sort of way, and her friend had said that everything about the house—the furnishings, the carpets—

  was threadbare and worn, growing old in shadow, faded with age. That, apparently, had changed, and a decorator from Edinburgh had splashed colour and renewed texture about the place.

  Isabel wondered whether the soul would have been taken out of the house by money and the search for comfort. She could not imagine Angie roughing it, and nor, when he was asked, could Jamie.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s high maintenance, I think.”

  “An expensive woman.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You could say that. But he’s pretty well off, isn’t he? So that doesn’t matter.”

  “And do you think she loves hi
m?” asked Isabel.

  Jamie looked out the window. They were now approaching the edge of town and the slopes of the Pentland Hills could be seen rising before them. Behind them, over the North Sea, there were clouds in the sky, and slanting squalls of rain; behind the Pentlands, though, the sky was light, glowing, as if with promise.

  He fiddled with a button on his jacket. It was hanging on by a thread, and he had meant to sew it before he came, but ran 1 8 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out of time. “I haven’t given it any thought,” he said quietly.

  “And I don’t think you should either.”

  Isabel was quick to deny her interest. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to interfere.”

  “Are you sure?” Jamie sounded dubious. He had witnessed Isabel’s interventions on more than one occasion, and if they had turned out well—or at least if they had not resulted in disaster—that was, he thought, owing in part to chance.

  “All right,” she said. “I confess that I’m intrigued. And who wouldn’t be? A conspicuously wealthy, sophisticated man has a young fiancée with not a great deal of grey matter—well, one thinks about that.”

  “It’s his business if he wants to take up with somebody like her,” said Jamie. “That’s what some men want.” He paused and looked at Isabel. “They’ll probably be blissfully happy.”

  Isabel conceded that. They could be happy, with each getting from the relationship what each wanted. But what, she asked, if he were to find out that she was interested only in his money? Could he be happy in those circumstances?

  “He might be,” said Jamie. “Presumably men like that have a pretty clear idea of what’s what. He might be able to see through her and still say to himself: Well, I don’t care if she doesn’t really love me, I’ve got an attractive young wife, and as long as she behaves herself . . .”

  “Which she might not do,” said Isabel quickly. “What if she has an eye for other men?”

  Jamie shrugged. “She’d be a fool.”

  Isabel drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She wondered whether Jamie was one of those people who just could not understand the tides of passion; who thought that people calculated advantage and disadvantage in matters of the 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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  heart—they did not; people behaved drunkenly, irrationally when it came to these things. Perhaps that was why Mary, Queen of Scots, married Darnley, against all her obvious interest? But she did not want to go into that. Already their discussion had developed an edge which was not right for a romantic trip into the country—if that was what this was going to be.

  Suddenly she was aware of Jamie beside her, of his legs at an angle, of his right arm resting in a position where it almost touched her side, of the wind from the half-open side window in his hair, ruffling it; and the phrase your ordinary human beauty came into her mind, and it seemed to her to be so apt. Beauty that was so ordinary because it required no ornament, no false enhancement; that was ordinary human beauty and it was superior to any other beauty.

  He said, suddenly, “Look at those sheep.”

  She looked. They were heading now up the hill from Auchendinny, and on the right side of the road there were fields and woods falling away to a river. The sheep were clustered about a hopper into which a farmer was siphoning feed of some sort. Little drifts of powdered feed, dust from the sheep’s table, were being blown away by the wind.

  “Their lunch,” she said. They both laughed; there was nothing funny about it, but it seemed to them that something significant had been shared. When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing, because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened? she wondered.

  She remembered something. “You know, I came out here quite a few years ago, when the Soviet Union was still in business. Just. It was shortly before its end. There was a woman who was a philosopher who had been sent over here by the Academy 1 8 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of Sciences of the USSR, and I was asked to entertain her for a few days. Mostly she wanted to go shopping, because they had so little in their own shops and she needed things. But I brought her out here to Peebles, to have lunch, and she saw sheep in the fields and cried out, ‘Look at all those sheeps! Look at all those sheeps!’ Sheeps. That’s what she said, understandably enough.

  And then she said, ‘Do you know, in my country, we have forgotten how to keep animals.’ ”

  Jamie was quiet. “And she hadn’t seen . . .”

  “She hadn’t seen anything like it,” said Isabel. “Apparently the Soviet countryside was pretty empty. Nobody on the collective farms kept animals. The bond between people and the land, between people and animals, had been broken.”

  Isabel remembered something else. “And here’s another thing she said. We had a meeting at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It was an open seminar on political philosophy, and this woman and the two male colleagues who had come with her came to it. They spoke in Russian, and there was a translator.”

  She paused as she remembered the translator, a sallow-faced man who had been a chain-smoker and who had slipped out of the room every fifteen minutes to have a cigarette. “Members of the public were invited, but hardly anybody came. There was one man who did, however, a rather thin, very elegant-looking man who must have been in his late seventies, I think. At the end, after our guests had finished, he asked a question. He spoke in Russian, and I saw them turn and stare at him in what seemed to be astonishment. And when I looked to her, this woman philosopher, I saw there were tears in her eyes. I asked her what he had said, and she just shook her head and replied,

  ‘It’s not what he said. That’s nothing. It’s just that I haven’t heard my language being spoken so beautifully, ever. Ever.’ It tranT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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  spired that he was speaking pre-revolutionary Russian, that he was the son of an exile who had been brought up speaking old Russian in France. Our visitors were used to the brutality of Soviet Russian, which was full of crudity and ugliness and jar-gon, and that is what made her cry. To hear real Russian spoken again.”

  TO M H A D F O U N D Tarwhinn House through a friend from Austin who had leased it a few years previously. The house had been in the same family for almost three hundred years, or so the owners claimed. It had been built in the seventeenth century by a man of some account in that part of Scotland, and it had remained with his successors until an unwise choice in the 1745 uprising—support for Bonnie Prince Charlie—had resulted in the then head of the family being outlawed, pursued to the very jetty from which he set ignominious sail for France, and his property taken away from him. That was the point at which the new owners acquired it by bribery, insinuating themselves into the position of the disgraced owner and eventually assuming his arms and his name. “An early example of identity theft,” remarked Isabel, when she heard the story.

  The current generation felt no need to gloss over the facts of the shameful acquisition and wholeheartedly adopted the romantic associations of the property. But they had other fish to fry, and the house and estate had been neglected. Eventually repairs could be put off no longer—the roof, in particular, was suffering from something which roofers call nail sickness, in which the nail holes through the slates grow larger, the nails weaken, and the slates begin to slip. The owners called in builders and decorators, and the air of damp and fustiness which had 1 8 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h pervaded the house gradually began to be replaced by warmth and light. But this was all an expensive process, and the long summer lets to visitors became all the more important. Somebody like Tom, who was prepared to take the house for two or three months, was ideal.

  “There it is,” said Isabel. “Can you see it? Over there.”

  Jamie looked in the direction in which Isabel had pointed.

  Just above a stand
of trees, the roof could be made out, and a few of the windows on the top storey. But then the trees blocked the view, and all he saw were Scots pines and a hillside rising sharp behind.

  “One of those tall, thin houses?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen it only once,” said Isabel. “And I don’t remember it very well. They had a Scotland’s Gardens open day a few years back and I saw it then. But I didn’t go into the house.”

  They turned off the public road at a lane end marked with a modest sign, a piece of painted board that announced tar-whinn house. They were now on the drive up to the house, a dirt track with only a little bit of gravel here and there. There were potholes, filled with water from the last rain, and Isabel slowed down to negotiate her way past them.

  They rounded a large cluster of rhododendrons and the house revealed itself. It was four storeys high and had the small windows which marked the fortified houses which people needed to build in those days. It looked rectangular—like a cardboard box standing on its end—but there was a simplicity about it which made it beautiful. The walls were pebble-dash harling and painted with a soft terracotta-coloured wash with just a touch of pink in it. This imparted to the house a soft quality, a sort of luminescence, which the gentle sun of late afternoon now caught, made glow.

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  “I love this place,” said Jamie impulsively. “I just love it.”

  There were two cars parked on the edge of the large gravelled circle at the front of the house; one was Joe and Mimi’s hire car, a small red vehicle which somebody had dented at the back, and the other was the large car which Isabel remembered seeing in Edinburgh when she had first spotted Tom and Angie.

  She nosed her green Swedish car into position behind Joe and Mimi’s car and stopped the engine.

  Jamie, still in the car, looked round. “Yes,” he said. “This is it.”

  “What?” asked Isabel. “What’s it?”