The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Grace was older than Isabel, but not by much—forty-six to Isabel’s forty-two. These four years, though, were important, as they reinforced her tendency to question Isabel’s judgement from time to time. Four years’ seniority in adult life was nothing, whatever it may count for in childhood; yet these four years gave Grace the advantage of Isabel—in Grace’s view. She thought her employer’s view of the world was unduly theoretical and 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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  that one day it would be moderated by experience. But that experience, she felt, was slow to come.

  The next morning Isabel was eager to tell Grace about Cat’s new boyfriend, but the conversation started off in a totally different direction. Guests were expected the following week and arrangements had to be made. Grace did not like visitors to be sprung upon her; she wanted to know exactly who was arriving, why they were coming, and when they would leave. After this had been sorted out, then the details could be addressed: which room they would stay in, what meals would be required, and so on.

  “You mentioned guests,” said Grace as she slipped out of her blue macintosh and hung it on the peg behind the kitchen door. “Next week, isn’t it?”

  Isabel, rising from the kitchen table where she had been attempting the first few clues of the Scotsman crossword, put down her pencil. “Yes,” she said. “Mimi and Joe. And they’re coming for just under a month. They’ll be going on to Oxford for a while and then back to Dallas.”

  Grace moved over to the sink and reached for her blue washing-up gloves. “Mimi and Joe? The ones who were here three or four years ago?”

  Isabel nodded. Mimi McKnight was her cousin, her mother’s first cousin, to be precise, and she and her husband, Joe, had visited her some years ago. Grace had met them then and, as far as Isabel remembered, got on well with them. There was no point in having guests with whom Grace disagreed: that could be disastrous.

  Grace picked up a plate from the drying rack and examined it. Isabel had washed it, and it might have to be washed again.

  But the specks she saw turned out to be part of the design and 2 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h it was set aside for shelving. She picked up another plate. This one was definitely still dirty, and the discovery pleased Grace.

  Isabel thought that she could wash up, but she was really no good at it, according to Grace. She had no idea how to load the dishwasher correctly and was always putting things away half-washed. She looked at the plate again, ostentatiously, so that Isabel might see her scrutiny. “A month?” she said as she began to fill the sink with water. “That’s a long stay.”

  “She’s my cousin,” said Isabel. “Cousins can stay indefinitely, and sometimes do. They’re different.”

  “I wouldn’t care to be away from my own bed for a month,”

  said Grace. “And I wouldn’t put up with a cousin who stayed indefinitely.”

  “Mimi and Joe are different,” said Isabel. “I like having them to stay. And . . .” She was about to say, “And they’re my guests, after all,” but stopped herself. It was no business of Grace’s how long her guests should stay (and that plate is not dirty, she thought), but that was not the way the house, or Isabel’s life, was ordered. Isabel was Grace’s business, at least in Grace’s mind, and that was the view which prevailed.

  Grace dipped the plate into the water and began to scrub at the recalcitrant fragments of food. “What will they do?” she asked. “Not that I’m being nosy.” She cast a glance at Isabel.

  “But why do they want to be away from home for that long?”

  Isabel folded up her copy of the newspaper. “Dallas in summer is not very pleasant,” she said. “It gets very warm. Baking, in fact. Think of Spain in summer, and then think hotter. Anybody who’s in a position to escape the heat does so.”

  She rose from the table. She would usually spend the first half-hour of the morning after Grace’s arrival immersed in the crossword, but today she felt disinclined to follow that routine.

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  She felt uneasy about something, and she thought that she might have been unsettled by the news of Cat’s new boyfriend.

  Nieces found new boyfriends every day—there was nothing unusual in that; nor was there anything uncommon in the dismissal of one boyfriend in favour of another. From what Eddie had said, Patrick might be an improvement on Cat’s previous boyfriends, and yet, she thought, there is something that makes me feel uneasy; I am not mistaken about this.

  She left Grace in the kitchen and went out into the hall.

  From behind her she heard Grace switch on the radio, as she often did when engaged in housework. It was a studio discussion, a regular programme in which four or five people were invited to debate issues of the time. They were well-known voices—people who could be counted on to give a view on most things—and Isabel found it irritating. Grace did too, on this occasion, and Isabel heard the radio switched off quickly. She smiled. This was Grace’s reaction to a well-known politician whose voice, she confessed, she could not bear. “I know he can’t help it,” she had said once. “I know it’s not his fault, but I just can’t tolerate the sound of him. And I disagree with everything he says. Everything.”

  Isabel moved through to her study, closing the door behind her. The morning’s mail had brought the usual selection of unsolicited manuscripts for the Review of Applied Ethics, which Isabel edited, but it had also brought the proofs of the next issue. The Review had taken to devoting every other issue to a single theme, and the topic for this issue was character and its implications for moral involvement in the world. She extracted the proofs from the padded envelope in which the printer had consigned them. This was always an important moment for her, when she saw the results of her work in printed form. And 2 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the editorial, which she often wrote at the last moment, would be there, in cold print, her own words invested with all the authority that printer’s ink on the page can impart.

  She looked at the editorial. It was a curious thing, but she sometimes found it difficult to believe that she had written these editorials, with their carefully balanced appraisal of the arguments that her authors marshalled in their papers. Was this really her, this deliberative, even-handed person who signed the editorial at the bottom Isabel Dalhousie, Editor? She wondered for a moment whether others felt this. Did artists sometimes look at their work and wonder how they did it?

  Character, she had written, is a term that almost requires explanation today. It means little to the psychologist, who talks about personality, but to the philosopher it is more than that. You may not be able to create a personality, but you can create a character for yourself.

  Had she said that? She had written it almost three months ago and the prose had a somewhat distant feel to it, rather like an old letter filed away. It worried her that she had been too enthusiastic about the possibility of creating character. If character and personality were the same thing, then somebody was wrong: either the psychologists for saying that personality was immutable, or the philosophers for saying that it was malleable.

  She was not sure, though, that psychologists said that personality was immutable: some did, perhaps, but others said that personality was just a collection of traits, some of which would be consistent across time and some of which would not.

  Isabel had discussed this once before with her friend Richard Latcham, who was a psychiatrist. She had met Richard when she was in Cambridge and they had stayed in touch. A few months ago she had gone to a reunion in Cambridge and he 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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  had invited her out to Papworth St. Agnes, where he lived. He had shown her his cars in what he called his motor house, a pagoda-style garage in the grounds of the sixteenth-century manor house. While looking at an old Bristol hard-top that he was restoring, the conversation had got on to effort and to how one mig
ht become good at the restoration of cars.

  “Even you, Isabel,” Richard had said. “Even you could do this.”

  She laughed. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  He said, “You’d learn. I’m not suggesting that you wouldn’t need to learn. But you could make yourself into a mechanic if you wanted to. What are you now? You’re a philosopher, aren’t you? But we can all become something different, can’t we?”

  She had looked at the car. On the wall, pinned up, was a photograph of the car before he had started his restoration work. The transformation seemed to bear out what he had said.

  But we can’t, she thought. We can’t all become something different. We may try to reinvent ourselves, but we are the same people underneath, incorrigibly so. She had turned to Richard and said as much, and he had reached out as she was speaking and removed a small mark from the bodywork of the fine old car.

  “Bats,” he said. “No, that’s not what I think of your view. It’s just the occasional bat gets in here and makes a mess of the cars.”

  Isabel thought for a moment. And then she said, “We don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.”

  Richard looked at her in surprise, and she laughed. “Sorry,”

  she said. “It’s just that somebody once wrote a paper called

  ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ A professor of philosophy called Thomas Nagel.”

  “And did Professor Nagel reach any conclusion?”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

  “That we don’t know. We can imagine. But we don’t know.”

  And then Richard had said, “Of course, when I said that you could change, I should have said that there are some things you can’t change entirely. Your personality, for example, is something that is always there. Certainly after about the age of thirty.”

  This had interested Isabel, because she thought that she had changed. The woman who had married John Liamor all those years ago, the young woman in Cambridge, her head turned by the cynical Irish historian with his unkempt good looks and his witty disparagements of what he called “the creaky gerontocracy” (by which he meant the University of Cambridge) and the “queerocracy” (by which he meant the Fellows of his College). That would be called homophobia now, but not then, when straight Irishmen could present themselves as victims, too, whose prejudices were beyond censure.

  She had changed, because now she would see through John Liamor; and she had changed in other respects too. She had become more forgiving, more understanding of human weak-nesses than she had been in her twenties. And love, too, had become more important to her; not love in the erotic sense, which obeyed its own tides throughout life and could be as intense, as unreasonable in its demands, whatever age one was, but love in the sense of agape, the brotherly love of others, which was a subtle presence that became stronger as the years passed; that, at least, was what had happened with her.

  “So there’s not much that we can do about that central bit of ourselves—the core?” she had asked. “Would you call it that—

  the core?”

  “A good enough name for it,” said Richard. “No, I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. The very deep bits of us, the real preferences, are there whether we like it or not. But 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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  if these deep bits are not very pleasant we can keep them under control. We can adapt to them.” He laid a hand on the polished bonnet of the old car, gently, with fondness, as on a precious object. “And I suppose we can develop positive attitudes which mean that in our dealings with others, in our day-to-day lives, we behave a bit better.”

  “And we would deserve credit for all the effort involved?”

  Richard gave Isabel the answer she herself would have given. “Yes. A lot of credit.” He paused. “I had a patient once who had a problem.” He smiled. “Well, all my patients have a problem, I suppose, but this one had a particularly difficult problem. He was a liar. He just felt compelled to tell lies—

  about all sorts of things. And he knew that it was wrong, and he had to fight with it every day. Life for him was one constant effort, but he managed to stop lying. And, do you know, I really admired that man. I really did.”

  He was right, she thought. It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

  That was where credit was deserved.

  Richard gestured that they should leave the motor house.

  He wanted to show Isabel the dovecote, with its small, carefully wrought bricks, an eighteenth-century addition.

  “That man, the liar, really liked monopole Burgundy,” he said as they walked out into the open air. “I remember that, for some reason. Monopole Burgundy from a single vineyard.” He looked at Isabel and smiled. “Or that’s what he told me.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” she said. And immediately she regretted saying this, because it made light of that man’s effort. So she quickly said that she was sure that he liked it.

  Richard was uncertain. “He might have liked it,” he said.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h S H E WO R K E D O N T H E P R OO F S , her study door closed behind her. Grace seemed to be busy upstairs, as Isabel heard her foot-fall through the ceiling. Something was dropped at one point, and fell with a thud, which was followed by a silence. Isabel looked up at the ceiling, and waited until the footsteps continued so she knew that Grace was not lying unconscious under some piece of furniture. Grace shifted things, which were never in quite the right place for her. Wardrobes would inch across a room; chests of drawers cross the carpet; occasional tables disappear into corners. Isabel thought that it might be something to do with the principles of feng shui. Grace had an interest in these things, although she was reluctant to talk about them, fearing Isabel’s scepticism. “There are some things we can’t prove,” she had once said to Isabel. “But we know that they work. We just know it.” And this had been followed by a challenging look, which left Isabel feeling unable to defend the position of empiricism.

  By lunchtime she had read and corrected almost half of the issue. Several of the authors’ footnotes had been mangled in the setting, with page numbers disappearing or inflating impossibly and requiring to be deflated. Page 1027 could not exist; page 127 could, or page 102 or 107. This involved bibliographic checking, which took time, and sometimes required getting back in touch with the author. That meant e-mails to people who might not answer them quickly, or at all. And that gave rise to the thought that an article on the ethics of e-mail would perhaps be a good idea. Do you have to answer every e-mail that you get? Is ignoring an electronic message as rude as looking straight through somebody who addresses a remark to you? And 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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  what, she wondered, was a reasonable delay between getting a message and responding to it? One of her authors had sent her an enquiry only two hours after sending an initial e-mail. Did you get my message? Can you give me a response? That, thought Isabel, could be the beginning of a new tyranny. Advances in technology were greeted with great enthusiasm and applause; then the tyranny emerged. Look at cars. They destroyed cities and communities. They laid waste to the land. Our worship at their altar choked us of our very air, constrained us to narrow paths beside their great avenues, cut us down. And yet . . . she thought of her green Swedish car, which she loved to drive on the open roads, which could take her from Edinburgh to the west coast, to Mull, to the Isle of Skye even, in four or five hours, just an afternoon. The same trip had taken the choleric Dr. Johnson weeks, and had been the cause of great discomfort and complaint. It was an exciting tyranny, then, one which we liked.

  She went through to the kitchen to fetch herself a sandwich and a bowl of soup for lunch. Grace had made the soup, as she often did, and it was simmering on the stove, a broth of leek and
potato, salted rather too heavily for Isabel’s taste, but good nonetheless. It was while Isabel was helping herself to this that Cat telephoned. There was often no particular reason for a telephone call from Cat, who liked to chat at idle moments, and this was such a call. Had Isabel seen that new Australian film at Film House? She should go, because it was excellent, better than anything else that Cat had seen that year. The Australians made such good films, didn’t they? So perceptive. And witty too.

  Had Isabel seen . . .

  Isabel sat down at the kitchen table, her soup before her, and continued to listen while Cat expounded on the merits of 3 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Australian cinema. Then, as Cat drew a breath, she asked, “Did you go that film with Patrick?”

  “Yes,” said Cat. “I did. He was working late and so we met at the—” She stopped. “You haven’t met Patrick, have you? Did I tell you about him?”

  Isabel thought quickly. She did not want to tell Cat that she had heard about Patrick from Eddie, because it might embarrass Eddie if Cat were to know that he discussed her affairs. She might not mind, of course, but one never knew with Cat.

  “I can’t remember,” she said, which was not true. And she thought: Why should I feel inclined to lie in a matter as petty as this? So she said, “Actually, I was speaking to Eddie and I asked where you were. He mentioned Patrick.”

  Cat was silent.

  “It would be nice to meet him,” Isabel went on. She tried to sound unconcerned, as if meeting Patrick was not all that important. “You could bring him round, perhaps.”

  “All right,” said Cat. “Whenever you like.”

  After that the conversation trailed off. No date was chosen for Cat to bring Patrick to meet Isabel, but Isabel made a mental note to herself to call Cat the following day and suggest an evening. She did not want to press her, as she was meant not to be too interested in something which was none of her business.

  She thought of Richard Latcham’s lying patient and his struggle to tell the truth. This was not a great moral battle that she faced, the battle not to get involved in matters that did not concern her; it was really quite a small one. But it was nonetheless her battle; unless, of course, one took the view that it was entirely natural to be interested in her niece’s boyfriends.