The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Eddie was in charge of the window displays, and looked forward to the beginning of each week, when he would rearrange them.

  He brought Isabel her coffee and sat down opposite her, his cleaning cloth draped casually over his shoulder. “I heard your news,” he said, grinning as he spoke. “Congratulations.”

  Isabel sipped at the scalding, milky coffee. She had not anticipated this; Cat must have told him. “She told you? Cat did?”

  Eddie nodded. “She wasn’t pleased. Or at least not at first.

  She said that I’d never believe what you’d got up to. Then she told me, expecting me to side with her.”

  Isabel watched Eddie as he spoke. He would never have been this forthcoming a few months ago. And when he had first come to work for Cat he would hardly have said more than a word of greeting, and mumbled at that. This was progress.

  “And you didn’t?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” said Eddie. “I laughed. She didn’t like that.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Isabel. “She virtually accused me of stealing him.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Eddie. “And I told her she had no right to be jealous.”

  Isabel told him that that was exactly what she had thought.

  But one was dealing with irrational feelings here, she pointed out. Jealousy was something which people found difficult to control; sometimes it was impossible.

  “I know,” said Eddie. “Anyway, I talked to her about it and she calmed down. Then, at the end, she said that maybe she should be proud. She said that . . .” He trailed off, and Isabel looked at him quizzically.

  “Go on,” she encouraged him. “She said what?”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Eddie looked sheepish. “She said that not everyone had an aunt who was capable of running off with a younger man. She said that it showed a certain style.”

  “And that was how you left it?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Then we started talking about Miranda.

  We—”

  Isabel glanced across the room and cut Eddie off. Miranda had finished dealing with the customer and was coming over to join them at the table. “Here she is. Here’s Miranda.”

  Miranda came up to stand behind Eddie. She greeted Isabel, smiling warmly, and then she rested a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie half turned, smiled and lifted a hand to place on hers, patting it fondly. Isabel watched in astonishment.

  “Yes,” said Eddie.

  “Well,” said Isabel. “Well . . .”

  “You should have told me, Isabel,” said Miranda in mock admonition. “You should have told me that the nicest boy in Scotland worked here. As it is, I had to discover that myself.”

  Eddie beamed with pleasure. “We must get back to work.”

  He rose to his feet and touched Miranda gently on the shoulder.

  “Come on.”

  Isabel watched them return to the counter. For each of us, she thought, there is our completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding, is a matter of moral luck. She had a good idea of what it was that had happened to Eddie, but now she saw that shattered, timid life begin to be made confident and whole, and she felt a warm rush of satisfaction and pleasure. She reached into her pocket and took out the note she had written to Cat. It was in its rectangular white envelope, the flap tucked in. She took it out and reread it. It had 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 time to choose and weigh each word; now she tore it up in seconds and tossed the pieces into the bin used for scraps of sugar wrappers and the like. The next move was Cat’s rather than hers, and she would wait for it with impatience. She did not have to apologise for Jamie; she did not have to apologise to anybody for her happiness.

  M I M I A N D J O E were out when she returned to the house, but Grace told her that they had said that they would be back in the late afternoon. There had been a change in their plans, and they had decided to go off the following day to Skye for a week. Joe wanted to write up his article on adoption and there were distractions in Edinburgh. “If I go somewhere really remote, I shall get it done,” he said. And Mimi had agreed. Skye, she said, was far enough away and, more important, there were few, if any, bookshops to distract him. For her part, she had reading to do, and could do it as well on a small island as on a big one.

  Isabel would miss them, but would see them briefly on their return. And they had persuaded her to make a trip to Dallas to stay with them, which she had agreed to do before too long. “My sainted American mother would have liked me to . . . ,” she had said, and faltered. No. There was no reason why her mother should not still be called sainted. A saint might still fall in love; indeed, would it not be most likely that those who loved their fellow man in general might feel all the more strongly inclined to love their fellow man in particular? I love Jamie, she thought, and has that not made me love the world all the more? Of course it had.

  That evening Mimi sat in the kitchen while Isabel did the 2 5 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cooking. They talked about Skye, and what Joe and Mimi might do there. They could stay in Claire Macdonald’s hotel; they could walk; they could watch the slow movement of the sea; they could sniff at the peat smoke in the air.

  “Come with us,” urged Mimi. “There’s room.”

  “I’d love to,” said Isabel. “But I have my work.”

  “Be irresponsible for once,” said Mimi.

  Isabel smiled at the thought. I’m being very irresponsible as it is, she thought, and it’s immense fun. “I can’t, I’m afraid,” she said. “The journal . . .”

  Mimi conceded. “Of course. But if you change your mind, jump in the car and join us.”

  Isabel, standing at the cutting board, neatly sliced an onion into rings. She felt tears come into her eyes and wiped them away with the back of her hand. “Not real tears,” she said to Mimi. “Nor even crocodile ones. Just onion tears.”

  “A nice name for tears that don’t mean anything,” said Mimi.

  “Yes. We’ll need to think about that.”

  She looked out the window. To the west, the sky had clouded over to the west and was heavy and dark. “Rain,” said Isabel. “I hope that you’re not washed out on Skye. It has a tendency to rain over there, as you know.” She remembered a couple of lines which Michael Longley had written about such landscapes: I think of Tra-na-Rossan, Inisheer / Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain. It was such a powerful image of the rain that came in off the Atlantic, relentless, horizontal across the island.

  “I’m not put off by rain,” said Mimi. “Rain can be beautiful, don’t you think? And there’s no point becoming depressed by it. That never changes anything.”

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  “That’s fine if you’re from Texas,” said Isabel. “Rain doesn’t outstay its welcome down there.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mimi. “But still . . .” She played with a button on her sleeve. “We had lunch in town today,” she said. “An interesting encounter.”

  “With?”

  “Angie, no less. She’s moved into town and is going back home tomorrow. Just her. The engagement with Tom is over, it seems. Very dramatic news. I’ve been itching to tell you. Joe, though, has been a bit embarrassed about it. He feels that it’s indecent to crow too much, even in a case like this. I told him I wasn’t crowing.”

  Isabel moved the chopped onion to the side of the board, neatly, making a small white pile. So Tom had acted. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. And she was, in a sense; it was a tale of unhappiness from start to finish—an unhappy, false beginning and now an unhappy ending.

  “Yes, it’s a bit sad really,” agreed Mimi. “I felt rather sorry for her at the end.”

  Isabel looked up in surprise. “For Angie?”

  “Yes,” said Mimi. “She said that she felt she had to do something about it.
She didn’t want to hurt Tom, she said, but she felt that it just wasn’t working.”

  Isabel stared at Mimi wide-eyed. “She said that she was the one who ended it?”

  “Yes. I must say that I was a bit taken aback. I’d thought of her, as you know, as a gold-digger. But a gold-digger doesn’t end an arrangement like that. A real gold-digger would have hung on in. She didn’t.”

  Of course she wouldn’t, thought Isabel. She would have 2 5 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h received her pay-off. There would be no reason to hold on after that.

  “Then she said something really surprising,” Mimi went on.

  “She said that Tom had offered her money to end the engagement. She said that she had been quite shocked and had turned him down.”

  “Turned him down?”

  “Yes.”

  No, thought Isabel, highly unlikely. “Did you believe her?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Mimi. “She seemed completely sincere.”

  Both were silent for a while. In Isabel’s case, it was a silence of indecision. If Angie was telling the truth, then Isabel had completely misjudged her. But had she been telling the truth?

  Mimi, though, seemed to be in no doubt. “I’ve learned a bit of a lesson,” she said. “Or rather, I’ve been reminded of something that I suppose I knew all along—that you just can’t be certain about people and their motives. You can’t. You think you know, then . . .”

  Mimi could be right, thought Isabel. And then reminded herself that she had encouraged Tom to end the engagement on the basis of her own, possibly misguided, feelings about Angie’s venality. But did that make any difference to the outcome? If Angie had ended it of her own accord, then the fact that she had urged Tom to tackle her about it was quite irrelevant. It occurred to her, though, that if Angie was not telling the truth and the break-up had really been at Tom’s insistence, then her own encouragement of Tom may have played a part in the end result.

  She looked helplessly at Mimi, wondering whether she should tell her cousin about what she had done. Mimi, though, had guessed that there was something on Isabel’s mind. “You’re 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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  feeling bad too?” she asked gently. “You shouldn’t worry about it, you know. Angie probably misjudged you too.”

  “Maybe. Maybe she did. But she wouldn’t have thought of me in quite the terms I thought of her. I doubt if she thought I was up to committing murder.”

  Mimi looked at Isabel in astonishment. “And you thought that of her? That she was capable of murdering Tom?”

  Isabel confessed that she had, and told Mimi of the conversation in which Tom had described Angie’s reaction to the near-disaster at the Falls of Clyde. Mimi listened thoughtfully, and then, when Isabel had finished, looked up into the air, as if searching for the solution to a conundrum. “Very curious,” she said at last. “Because, believe it or not, she said something rather similar to me. She said that she felt unsafe in Tom’s presence, as if there was something in him, something not always apparent, something buried deep within him, and this thing, this hidden thing, was a propensity to violence. She said she feared that he might use it against her.”

  They looked at each other. “Well,” said Isabel. “Who’s to be believed?”

  “Both?” asked Mimi.

  Isabel considered this. It was true that people were inclined to rewrite their personal histories, like overly generous biogra-phers, so that they appeared in the best light. But even if there was no such rewriting here, it was quite possible that two people might feel threatened by each other and harbour fears that the threat might materialise; that was quite believable. It was also perfectly possible that Angie had made the first move to end the engagement, and that Tom, feeling guilty, had still offered her a financial settlement, and that she, out of pride, had turned it down. If this were so, then everything had worked out for the 2 6 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h best, for everybody. A loveless marriage was staved off, Angie’s pride was intact; and Tom, on mature reflection, might conclude that he had no need to feel guilty about anything.

  She turned to Mimi to answer her question. “Perhaps,” she said. It was not much of an answer, but there were circumstances in which “perhaps” or “maybe” were the only answers one could honestly give.

  She pondered, though. She pondered the question of whether she had done a wrong to Angie—a wrong which somehow needed redress. She had thought ill of her, and although Angie might never have been aware of what was thought of her, Isabel had gone further and actually spoken ill of her. That, in any system of reckoning, was a wrong against another. But she was not sure if she had the moral energy to pursue the matter and, besides, what could she do: write to her and apologise?

  Only the most conscientious person would take moral duty to those lengths, and Isabel decided to leave matters where they lay. She had learned her lesson about leaping to conclusions and judging people unfairly, and that perhaps was enough. Again it was a question of a “perhaps.”

  J O E A N D M I M I went to Skye, where it rained, and came back to Edinburgh, where it rained too, but not so persistently. Then, after a few more days there, they left for Oxford, where they planned to spend the rest of the summer. “Joe’s happy there,”

  said Mimi. “He was a Rhodes Scholar, quite a few years ago now, and it’s full of memories. I’m not sure whether we’re happiest at that time of life, but we often think we were.”

  I’m happiest now, thought Isabel. She wanted to say that to Mimi, but hesitated, because it seemed to her that one might so 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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  easily slip into sentiment; and protestations of happiness could sound almost boasting to those whose happiness is incomplete.

  One did not boast of perfect skin to one affected by dermatitis; for the same reason, perhaps, one should take care in proclaim-ing one’s happiness. Not that Mimi was unhappy in any way; she seemed equable, content and, indeed, Isabel need not have felt reticent, as Mimi, detecting Isabel’s state of mind, commented on it. Mimi had enough experience of life to sense the presence of love in the life of another, and to understand its transforming power. And she knew, too, how strong may be our wish to show off the object of our love, to say, Look, here he is, here!

  “I know what’s happening to you,” Mimi said, reaching for Isabel’s hand. “Enjoy your good fortune.”

  To her own surprise, Isabel did not feel any embarrassment.

  “I have to pinch myself,” she said. “I have to persuade myself that it’s real.”

  “It seems real enough to me,” said Mimi.

  “And I know that it can’t last for ever,” said Isabel. “Auden said—”

  Mimi smiled. “I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. Yes, we all think that. But don’t be too realistic about it.

  Love can last an awfully long time. Even after the other person has gone away, one can still love him. People do that all the time.” She paused, and looked enquiringly at Isabel. “Is he likely to go away?”

  They were sitting in Isabel’s study during this conversation, and Isabel glanced up at the shelves of books as she answered.

  Her life was filled with baggage: a house; all these books, all these philosophers; a garden, a fox . . . Jamie’s life had none of that. He could go away at any time if a good job came up some-2 6 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h where in an orchestra. He had almost joined an orchestra in London not all that long ago, and he had also talked of living in Berlin as if it were a real possibility. She had never thought of living in Berlin, and would have no idea how to go about it; that was the difference between them, that and those fourteen years.

  “He might,” Isabel said. “I think we’re at different stages of our lives. We really are. He might want to go off and work somewhere else. He’s just starting. He could do anything.”

  Mimi
reached for a magazine on the sofa beside her. She flicked idly through the pages, and then turned again to Isabel. “There’s an expression that people use these days—have you noticed it?—which is actually quite useful. They just say

  ‘whatever.’ It sounds very insouciant—and it is—but there are occasions . . .”

  “And you feel that you want to say it now?”

  “Yes,” said Mimi. “Whatever. There you are. Whatever. It more or less sums things up. Things will sort themselves out.

  That’s what it means. Things will sort themselves out and we don’t really need to do anything.”

  “Whatever,” said Isabel.

  “Yes,” said Mimi, tossing the magazine aside. “Whatever.

  And do take some advice from me on this, Isabel. You know that I don’t like to play the older cousin, but maybe just this once.

  May I?”

  Isabel nodded her assent. She could not imagine herself ever resenting advice from Mimi. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Just let this thing evolve naturally,” said Mimi. “Stop thinking about it. Just for the moment remember that first you are a woman, then, second, you’re a philosopher. Can you do that, do you think?”

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  It would be hard not to be a philosopher, because that is what she was, and, thought Isabel, you don’t easily forget what you are. But she could try, and she told Mimi she would. This satisfied her cousin, who only wanted Isabel to be happy, that was all. And Isabel wished the same for Mimi, and knew, too, that she would miss her when she went back to Dallas. They would write to one another, and speak on the telephone, but it was never the same as being in the same room, without three thousand miles of sea and half a continent between you.

  On impulse she rose to her feet and bent down to plant a kiss on Mimi’s brow, which made Mimi smile, moist-eyed for a moment at this friendship between cousins, something one could never replicate afresh, even if one had the recipe, relying as it did on a long past, and so much that had been said and not said.

  OV E R T H E N E X T T WO W E E K S Edinburgh basked in unusual warmth. Isabel found that she could sit out in her garden and work there, in a shady spot to avoid the heat in the sun. She had to water the lawn, which had started to dry out, and when she did so she caught the Mediterranean smell of settling dust, and the scent of thyme, too, wafting from her herb bed. It was a time of long afternoons and the humming sound of bees attracted by the low lavender hedge about her lawn. She and Jamie had several meals outside, lunches and dinners, sitting lazily on the grass itself or on the old canvas deck chairs which Isabel had taken from their dusty storage place in the garden shed. With his pupils away on holiday, Jamie had less to do than usual. He was working on a composition, he said, but it was going slowly: