“I can tell what people are thinking,” she said. “I really can.”
And Isabel had said, “Oh yes, well, tell me what I’m thinking then.”
“You’re thinking that I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” said Grace. And in that she was right.
Jamie did not follow them into the bedroom, but returned to the kitchen, to peer again out the window. Florence pointed 4 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out the cupboards, the old fireplace in which stood an arrangement of dried flowers and which, she said, could be opened up again if one wanted an open fire. “So many flats had their fireplaces taken out,” she said. “Beautiful old Victorian fireplaces.
Georgian too. Such a loss.”
Isabel looked at the dried flowers, dusty and pale, washed of colour. “Such a tucked-away bedroom,” she said. “So snug.”
Florence gave her a conspiratorial look. “Yes. I can see you in this place, you know. You and your friend.” She looked through the open door in the direction of the kitchen.
For a moment Isabel said nothing. She felt embarrassed by the misunderstanding, but she also felt flattered that Florence should imagine that she and Jamie were together in that sense.
Yes, she thought, it would be good to be living here with him, living together as lovers. But she could not let Florence continue to believe something that was false, and so she started to explain. “Jamie and I—” she began. But she did not continue, as Jamie had appeared in the doorway.
“The bedroom,” said Isabel, letting him look past her. “Isn’t it nice?”
Jamie nodded his approval. Again he went to the window and looked out, poking at the wooden frame as he did so. He had told Isabel about rotten window sills in New Town flats and the importance of knowing just what repairs one was letting oneself in for. This wood appeared to be solid, though, and he turned to face into the room. Florence was staring at him, a smile about her lips.
Isabel could not say anything about Jamie now, could not give the explanation that was needed, and so she looked at her watch and then at Jamie. “We should be getting along,” she said.
“We have to . . .” She left that unfinished. They did not have to 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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do anything, but she felt that she had seen enough of the flat and she wanted to be out in the street. She would offer for it, she thought. She would talk to Simon Mackintosh, her lawyer, and make an offer.
They said goodbye to Florence, who saw them off in the hall. Then, on the stairway, on the way down, Jamie turned to her and said, “As nice as it gets around here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Top floor, which will make a difference to the noise.
Bedroom at the back. Well maintained. And the wiring’s new. I had a quick look.”
Isabel smiled at him. “I knew that it was a good idea to bring you.”
They went out onto the street, closing the heavy, blue-painted communal door behind them. A young couple walked past them, going in the direction of Royal Circus, the woman’s midriff was exposed, the mottled white flesh shaking as she moved, and the man’s jeans were fashionably torn, affording a view from the rear of dark-blue undershorts. Display of the body, thought Isabel; changing conceptions of the private. It was no longer socially impermissible for men to show their undershorts, and perhaps that was not unreasonable. Was there anything inherently more private about one garment rather than another?
Jamie was going to Castle Street, and Isabel, who was returning home, had planned to go in that direction, so they walked together up Gloucester Lane towards the end of Heriot Row. Gloucester Lane was a narrow cobbled alleyway on both sides of which were mews houses. Jamie pointed out how much more expensive these were, although sometimes they were smaller than the flat they had just looked over.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“It’s strange how much people will pay for an address,” he said. “Don’t you think that rather odd?”
“Not at all,” said Isabel. “Jockeying for social position is what people do. Instinctively. We’re competitive creatures.”
He looked up at a window in which a black-and-white cat was seated, eyeing them disdainfully. “You’re a bit of a snob, Isabel.”
He had not intended to say it; it had just come out. And now it was uttered, and he regretted it, as he sensed Isabel bristle beside him.
She stopped and turned to him. “I most certainly am not,”
she said. “That’s most unfair. It really is.”
He reached out and took her arm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that seriously. You’re not a snob. You’re not.”
Isabel brushed his hand away. “All I said was that people do tend to go for what they think of as socially prestigious. And they do. Everywhere, in every society you care to mention.
That’s just a factual observation. A snob would say that it mattered where you came from, what your address was, and so on. I don’t say that for a moment. Not one moment.”
Jamie knew that she was right, and that his comment had been wrong and hurtful. Poor Isabel. She tried so hard to do the right thing—she agonised over these things all the time—and he had gone and accused her of something really nasty, which she did not deserve.
She had started to walk off without him, and he ran to catch up with her. “That was a stupid remark I made,” he said. “Really stupid. Will you forgive me?”
Her voice was cold. “Think nothing of it.”
“I meant— really forgive me,” he said.
She was silent, and so Jamie persisted. “You know, you often 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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go on about forgiveness. Yes, I’ve heard you. And yet do you practise it yourself?”
She looked at him. “So now you’re accusing me of hypocrisy as well as snobbery? Is that it?”
“Oh, Isabel, for God’s sake . . .”
She closed her eyes. He was right in what he said about forgiveness; it was just that she was vulnerable to insensitive words from him—not that his words had been particularly insensitive—and this vulnerability was all the greater because she could not talk to him about it. To him she was just another friend, nothing more, and one could talk like that to a mere friend. And that, she thought, is my personal tragedy. As long as I am afraid to tell him of my love, to confess it to him, then I shall have to pretend that we are just friends on this level. But I cannot tell him. That would end even the friendship. He would be appalled. He would run away.
“We’re arguing over nothing,” she said. “Of course I know you didn’t mean it. Sorry.”
They resumed their walk up the hill. At the top of Gloucester Lane, the mews houses gave way to broader, more elegant streets, to Heriot Row and Darnaway Street. Heriot Row, which faced south, was a long sweep of Georgian terrace, with formal gardens on the other side. It was a street and an attitude rolled into one; most of those who lived here played the part expected of them and furnished their houses and flats with Georgian furniture. The high windows of the drawing-room floors were draped with long-drop curtains, bunched at the sides, secured with formal tassels; the windows at street level afforded a glimpse of dining rooms with rise-and-fall lights above large mahogany tables, of grand pianos, of book-lined studies. It was a world which Isabel understood, and in which she could move, and yet 4 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h it was not the world in which she chose to live. There was a deadness of the soul in such places, she thought; it was like being in a museum, living a life devoid of colour and spontaneity.
“Heriot Row has always given me the creeps,” she said.
Jamie looked up at the windows. “I don’t know,” he said. “I went to a party here once. I didn’t get the creeps. In fact, it was rather fun.”
“It’s too perfect,” she said. “I suppose most cities have places which are just too perfect. There’s Mayfair in Lo
ndon. All very clean and well looked after. But sterile too. And there are those streets in the smart parts of New York. The ones with those unwelcoming doormen. Too rarefied for me.”
She was about to say something about Paris, too, when something caught her eye. She and Jamie were about to cross the road when a car swung down from Wemyss Place and turned right into Heriot Row.
“That’s a beauty of a car,” Jamie said. “Look at it.”
Isabel was uninterested in cars, but interested in those within. And in this case she recognised them, the man and the woman from the gallery. He was at the wheel, occupied with driving, but the woman turned and looked at Isabel and Jamie as the car went past. She looked at Isabel for only a moment, a look which gave no sign of recognition; then her eyes moved to Jamie, and for a brief second she stared at him before the car moved beyond them and made its way down Heriot Row.
“That woman looked at you,” said Isabel. “Did you see?”
“What a stunner,” said Jamie.
“Not close up,” said Isabel. “I met her in the Scottish Gallery.”
“I was talking about her car,” said Jamie.
A few minutes later they parted company. Jamie had to visit 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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an insurance office in Castle Street and so they said goodbye at the corner of Hill Street. Then Isabel continued her walk home, thinking, as she did, of the coincidence of seeing the American visitors twice in so short a time. What were they doing? Who were they? She was barely any further along the road to knowing anything about that than she had been when she first saw them from the window of Glass and Thompson. But why that should be of the slightest importance, she had no idea. She meant nothing to them, and they should mean nothing to her. And yet they did.
C H A P T E R F O U R
E
MY DEAR,” said Mimi McKnight, “just look at us! Bedrag-gled! In need of . . . well, in need of everything, I suspect.
Hydration, certainly.”
Isabel had offered to fetch Joe and Mimi from the airport, but had been firmly turned down. They would find a taxi, they said, and arrive under their own steam, which they did, laden with several months’ worth of luggage and gifts for Isabel and the various others with whom they would be staying on their trip. Isabel received two large bottles of Tabasco sauce, a copy of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems and a nineteenth-century Mexican miniature silver candelabra.
Mimi was first cousin to Isabel’s mother, Hibby. Mimi was from Dallas, but Hibby had been born and raised in Mobile, on the Alabama coast, a city of elegant oaks and long stories of the blood. Mobile was a proud place, and did not care for the ignorant condescension of outsiders. “We invented Mardi Gras,”
Isabel had been told by her mother. “New Orleans thinks it did, but it’s wrong. We did. That’s your heritage, Isabel.” But there was another side to the heritage of well-to-do Mobile, of course: the dark side of the South—and this was not talked about, or 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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used not to be. It was there, though, and could be seen in the musty family photograph albums, where the servants stood in the background, under a tree, beside the cars, carrying things.
That’s what can lie behind money, thought Isabel; not always, but often: expropriated lives; the lives of people in the background, nameless, forgotten, who never really owned very much.
As a teenager Isabel’s mother had been sent to Dallas in the summer, away from the humidity of the Gulf Coast and into dry heat of the Texas plains, thought to be better for you and more tolerable. There she stayed with her cousin, Mimi, and did the things which teenagers of the time and place did: shopping at Neiman Marcus on Commerce Street, swimming at the club, waiting for something to happen, which it never did.
Then their paths had diverged. Hibby had gone to New York, to the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School, and had then worked for two years with a firm of Wall Street lawyers. Several of these lawyers would have been quite happy to marry her; she was good-looking and had that Southern charm that young men found irresistible. But she, in turn, found the attractions of a Scottish graduate student at Columbia Law School equally irresistible, and married Isabel’s father instead. Back in Mobile, they put a brave face on this, and those relatives who had met her intended husband reported positively. It was not the end of the world. Mimi, in particular, who had met Isabel’s father at the engagement party that Hibby held in New York, could not understand their misgivings. “Everything about him is perfect,”
she said. “Even his imperfections.”
Mimi’s marriage to Joe McKnight was a second marriage for both of them. Joe, a professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was an authority on Texas legal history and the law of the Spanish colonies, of which Texas had been one.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Had been, Joe stressed. “We stole it from the Mexicans fair and square,” he pointed out, half seriously.
His interests were antiquarian, and these were shared by Mimi, who dealt in rare books. Joe restored and rebound these books in the small bindery that he had set up in an upstairs room in their Dallas house, a room stacked with pots of glue, bolts of soft binding leather, all the tools of that trade. He knew all about these leathers and endpapers and bookworms. And Mimi knew all about choral music and old cookery books and cats.
They arrived in the early evening. Isabel had shown them to their room, the guest room at the back of the house, which, although it got little direct sunlight, had a view over the garden.
“The room we were in last time,” said Mimi. “And there’s that painting.” She crossed the room to look at the large oil hung on the wall above the chest of drawers. A man and his wife, their arms around two young children, huddled together on the deck of a sailing ship. Behind them the waves were swelling, whipped to white at the crests, almost obscuring the shores of a distant island. “That’s Skye, isn’t it?” she asked.
Isabel nodded. “McTaggart,” she said. “And yes, I think that it is Skye. He painted quite a few pictures like that. People leaving Scotland, setting off for their new lives in Nova Scotia or Boston, or wherever it was.”
Mimi stood before the large picture, which she gazed at through her large oval glasses. “And off they went,” she said.
“Look at the children’s expressions. Look at them.”
Isabel joined Mimi in front of the painting. She was not particularly fond of McTaggart, and this explained the painting’s presence in the guest bedroom, where she rarely saw it. It had been a favourite of her father’s, though; he liked nineteenth-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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century Romantic painters and had bought this cheaply at an auction, one of the first paintings he acquired, and had given it to Isabel’s mother. Isabel suspected that her mother had not liked it either, but had never said as much.
The children in the painting seemed impervious to their fate. The parents saw before them only a hazardous sea voy-age, weeks of seasickness and privation, and, at the end of it all, a landing in a hard and unknown country. For the children, though, setting sail was a great adventure. The boy, his face bright with excitement, was pointing at a seagull that was riding the boat’s slipstream; the girl was saying something to a doll she was clutching—some maternal words of encouragement, a lul-laby perhaps.
“It makes me think of ‘Lochaber No More,’ ” said Isabel.
“Do you know that song, Mimi? It’s about leaving Scotland.
About never again seeing the place you’ve loved.”
Mimi, lost in the painting, said nothing.
Isabel recited:
“Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my Jean, Where heartsome wi’ her I ha’e mony day been, For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more, We’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.”
Mimi turned to Isabel. “But that’s very beautiful,” she said.
“Sad. Sa
d and beautiful. To be heartsome with somebody. What a lovely word.”
Isabel smiled. “That’s what this country’s like, you know. It has a way of surprising you. It’s hard to be indifferent to it.” She turned away from the McTaggart. “But I have things to do. We’re having company for dinner.”
She was aware as she spoke that she had unconsciously 5 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h slipped into an American idiom. People in Edinburgh did not have company in the way in which they did in America. They had guests.
“Guests?” asked Mimi.
“Yes,” said Isabel. “Cat.”
“Good,” said Mimi. “I have a gift for her. And Joe has always had a soft spot for Cat, haven’t you, Joe?”
“Yes,” said Joe. “Nice girl.”
“And she has a new boyfriend, Patrick,” said Isabel. “He’s coming with her.”
Mimi and Isabel exchanged glances. Mimi had heard of Toby, and of the others; or at least she had heard Isabel’s version.
“I’ve not met him yet,” Isabel admitted. “But preliminary reports . . .” She hesitated. There had been only one report so far, and that had come from Eddie. Was Eddie a good judge of these matters?
“Are favourable?” asked Mimi.
“Yes,” said Isabel. “But we shall shortly see. I hope you don’t mind, by the way, having something on your first evening. It occurred to me after I had arranged it that you might want a quiet evening.”
Mimi assured Isabel that she and Joe would be very happy to be entertained that night. “And I want to meet Patrick,”
she said. “Poor young man. Do you think he’ll mind being on display?”
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