The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I think I’m going to faint,” which would immediately bring about suggestions that one sit down—elsewhere. That enabled movement, but the excuse had to be used sparingly. One could acquire a reputation for fainting too frequently.

  “You get invited to cocktail parties in hell,” a friend of Isabel’s had once observed. “There’s one every evening. But I gather there’s nothing to drink. And you have to go.” He frowned and looked regretful. “I’m not looking forward to it,” he went on.

  “Not one little bit!”

  Isabel had asked him about how he dealt with the problem of being trapped, and he had thought for a moment before he gave his reply.

  “You can mention your infectious diseases,” he said. “That sometimes gets people moving. The other possibility is to say: ‘Let’s talk about religion. Let’s really talk about it.’ That works too.”

  But this was not a cocktail party. West Grange House, a Georgian house behind walls, stood in the middle of a large garden that had been transformed for the occasion. Long trestle tables, covered with white linen cloths, had been set up beneath the two large oak trees that stood mid-lawn. Along these tables were wooden chairs, at least forty of them, and 1 4 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h places were laid before each: white napkins, glasses, silver. Near the large, sunken rockery, a table had been set up for the bar; next to it was a large tin bath in which stood a big lump of ice, like an ice sculpture awaiting its sculptor, with bottles nestling round its base.

  Isabel liked this house. She liked the air of quietness, the feeling of being away from the fray, which, she thought, is exactly what a house should provide. She liked the feeling, too, that things were planned here; that what happened in this house happened because it was meant to. And this party, she thought, which had been decided upon only two or three days before, looked as if it were the result of weeks of preparation.

  Joe and Mimi were introduced to Peter and Susie and taken off to meet somebody. Isabel, a glass of wine in her hand, walked out onto the lawn, nodding to one or two friends in the clusters of guests. It was a clear, warm evening, in spite of Isabel’s foreboding that the Scottish weather would misbehave; perhaps this was global warming, the creeping of Mediterranean conditions northwards, the migration of species into northern zones; hammerhead sharks in the Irish Sea—that was a thought—scorpions in the villages of England. But we had been warned, she reminded herself, that global warming would bring Scotland only more rain and less sun.

  She looked heavenwards, and felt dizzied, as she always did when she looked up into an empty sky; the eye looked for something, some finite point to alight upon, and saw nothing. It might make one dizzy, she told herself, but it might make one humble too. Our human pretensions, our sense that we were what mattered: all of this was put in its proper place by simply looking up at the sky and realizing how very tiny and insignificant we were. Our biggest cities, our most elaborate sympho-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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  nies, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the smartest gadgets, were nothing really, just a momentary arrangement of the tiny number of atoms we had in our minuscule patch of space. Nothing.

  “A monkey puzzle tree.”

  Isabel turned round. Mimi, a glass of what looked like champagne in her hand, had come up behind her.

  “Yes,” said Isabel, glancing at the tree at the far end of the garden. “They used to be very popular. The Victorians loved them and put them everywhere.”

  “You’re so lucky with your soil,” said Mimi. “You have this lovely rich soil. My garden in Dallas is clay. And it gets so dry.”

  It sounded to Isabel as if Mimi were reproaching herself.

  “You can’t help your soil,” Isabel said. “Nor your weather.”

  Mimi looked at a clump of rhododendrons in flower along one of the garden walls, the blossoms pink and red against the dark green of the leaves. “Our soil is our fault—to an extent.

  Remember the dust bowl. Dust storms and tumbleweed? That was human greed. And we repeat that sort of mistake, don’t we?

  Look at Las Vegas, if you can bear to. That’s in the desert, we should remind ourselves. We’ve built that dreadful disaster in the desert, of all places.”

  “I suppose somebody likes Las Vegas,” said Isabel.

  Mimi was silent. There was a bird somewhere in the undergrowth, hopping about, making the leaves rustle.

  “I’m sorry about the other day,” Mimi said suddenly. “I’m not sure if I should have told you what I told you. About your mother.”

  Isabel continued to stare at the point where the bird had been. “I’m glad that you did. And I asked you to. If you had refused I would have felt that you were hiding something from me. And we have to know these things . . .”

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

  “Do we?” asked Mimi.

  “Once we suspect them.”

  Mimi was unconvinced. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m not sure that we want our parents to be human. We know that they are, of course, but it’s a special sort of knowledge—or I think it is. Like the knowledge that we’re not here on this earth for ever.

  We know that, but we don’t think of it all the time, do we? We put it to the back of our minds.”

  Isabel took a sip of her wine. Champagne had been on offer, but she had missed it for some reason. “Well, if we don’t want to know too much about our parents—or about their faults, rather—then maybe that’s because we see ourselves in what they did. We recognise their failings because they are our own failings too. Unacknowledged, perhaps.”

  Mimi nodded. “That may be.”

  Isabel decided that she would go on. She could talk to Mimi because she was family, but a friend too, and she had always felt that Mimi understood. But how could she put it? And would Mimi be shocked? She had to remind herself that there was nothing shocking about it. Not objectively, but talking to another person about what one felt at that most intimate level was an incursion into the private, whatever people said, however frank the climate of the day.

  She turned and looked at Mimi, and saw herself again, for a moment, in the lenses of those oval glasses, as in a mirror. “I was surprised to hear that my mother had had an affair, but . . .

  but that’s not all that unusual and people do. However, it was the fact that it was with a younger man, a far younger man.

  That . . .”

  Mimi smiled. “Shows good taste? A certain spirit?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m on the verge of doing.” She had said 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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  it, and it sounded ridiculous. To be on the verge of having an affair! Either one had an affair or one did not.

  Isabel looked for signs of surprise in Mimi, but there were none. Mimi just looked at her, as if expecting her to say something else. “But I knew that,” she said. “Jamie. I assumed that.”

  Now the surprise was Isabel’s. “I didn’t realise . . .”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” said Mimi, reaching out for Isabel’s forearm. “We never realise how transparent we are. But people know. It was obvious at that dinner party you gave.”

  “You gave.”

  “I gave,” acknowledged Mimi. “You can tell when somebody is in love with another person. There’s a conspiratorial look.

  No, that’s not quite right. There’s a connivance. No, that’s not correct either. There’s something. Put it that way. There’s something.”

  “And you saw that there was something?”

  Mimi patted her gently on the arm. “I did.” She paused, looking directly at Isabel. Now, thought Isabel, now come the words of warning, of caution. Do you think that it’s . . . I don’t want to interfere, but . . . Instead, Mimi said, “Who wouldn’t? Or rather, who couldn’t?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Mimi spoke clearly. “Who couldn’t be in love with him?

&
nbsp; Certainly, if I were your age, which I’m not, and if I were single, which I’m not, I’d have no hesitation in falling for somebody like that.”

  It was the third such reaction. Florence Macreadie had said much the same thing, and then Grace. Now it was Mimi’s turn.

  Nobody, it seemed, saw a problem. Or did the problem exist only in her imagination?

  Isabel was about to speak. She suddenly felt she wanted to 1 4 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tell Mimi about how she had agonised over her feelings for Jamie, and how it now seemed that it had all been unnecessary.

  But before she could say anything Mimi said, “A young man like that, of course, turns heads. He’ll have people falling for him left, right and centre. Angie certainly did that evening. Did you see it?”

  Isabel felt a sudden stab of anxiety. She had seen Angie talking to Jamie and it had been obvious that they were getting on well. And then there was the invitation for Jamie to join them at the house party. But she had not imagined that it was anything serious.

  “They talked a lot, yes. But do you really think that there was more to it than that?”

  Mimi laughed. “Oh yes, I do. She was devouring him with her eyes. Throughout the meal, she was hanging on his every word. Which made me think, I’m afraid.”

  Isabel smiled. “But I thought that you had already done that bit of thinking. I thought that you had your doubts about Angie’s commitment to Tom.”

  Mimi made a gesture of agreement. “Yes. But this confirmed my suspicions in that respect. A recently engaged woman doesn’t make eyes at a young man if she’s happy with her new fiancé.” She paused and looked at Isabel, as if for confirmation.

  “She doesn’t, does she? And you don’t need to be much of a psychologist to reach that conclusion.”

  At the far end of the lawn, under one of the oak trees, Susie clapped her hands together. Dinner, brought out on several large serving plates by a pair of young helpers, was now being served on the trestle tables. There would be a seat for almost everybody, Susie called out, and there were extra seats in the kitchen for those who could not be accommodated at the tables.

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  Isabel walked with Mimi towards the tables. Susie, seeing Mimi, came to her side and led her to a place in the middle of the larger table. Isabel, detaching herself, was preoccupied with what Mimi had said about Angie. So Angie found Jamie attractive; well, that was hardly earth-shattering news—any woman would, as Mimi herself had said. And if it was true that Angie was after Tom’s money, then that was hardly anybody else’s business, other than Tom’s relatives, who could have an interest in his assets. Fortune hunters were hardly rare, and in places like Highland Park and University Park, those plush suburbs on the edge of Dallas where there were numerous oil and other fortunes—the Hunts, the Perots and others in that league—

  people must know about the need to be careful. If Angie had penetrated the defences of those tight circles and found a middle-aged man who was prepared to share his millions with her, then she was not doing much more than playing a wealthy society by its own rules, and nobody should be unduly surprised or concerned. And certainly she, Isabel Dalhousie, should keep out of it; she who had recently decided that she would mind her own business and not get caught up in the affairs of others. Yet this was the same she who found this so very difficult and who could not ignore the needs of those with whom she came into what she called moral proximity.

  She found a seat at one of the tables, not far from the end, and sat down. She was beside a thin-faced man with a shock of dark hair and that almost translucent skin which goes with a particular strain of Celtic genes. She shook hands with him and they exchanged names. He was Seamus. Of course you are, she thought; that name went with the genes. And on her other side sat a tall, attractive girl of about twenty, with a wide smile and an Australian accent. Her name was Miranda, and she had 1 5 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h come with one of the other guests, she said, adding that she knew nobody else in Edinburgh apart from the people she was staying with. “And I have to find a job,” she said, the smile spreading across her face. “Or I’m going to starve.”

  “I could try to help,” said Isabel, almost automatically. She sneaked a glance at Miranda’s plate. It was stacked high with food. Perhaps this was her first proper meal for days . . . But then she had said that she was staying with people, and that implied that she was being fed. Unless there was a category of guests whom one did not have to feed. Isabel smiled at the thought. Please come and stay with me, but I won’t be able to feed you. I hope you don’t mind . . .

  “Could you?” said Miranda eagerly. “Could you really?”

  Isabel had not thought before she spoke, and now realised that she had no idea how she might help. How could she find anybody a job? It was moral proximity again; if one sat next to somebody one had to at least try to help her find a job. Certainly one could not let that person starve.

  “Well, I’m not sure,” Isabel said. “I don’t know . . .”

  The disappointment showed in Miranda’s face, and Isabel immediately relented.

  “What can you do?” she asked.

  “Anything,” said Miranda. “Anything general. I’m happy to do anything. I’m not fussy, you see. No worries.” She laughed.

  “And I can cook too. No worries there either.”

  Isabel thought for a moment. She imagined living in a world as uncomplicated as Miranda’s seemed to be. A world in which there would be, as Miranda had said—twice—no worries. She looked at Miranda and saw that there were small freckles on her face, and she noted, too, that her nose was aquiline, markedly 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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  so; and then there was a bracelet on her sun-tanned forearm, one of those plaited elephant-hair bracelets that people picked up in Nairobi or Cape Town or somewhere like that. And she looked up at the sky, just for a moment, at the high blue, which seemed to dance—a trick of the light, and the emptiness—and she thought of Jamie suddenly, and thought, Bless him, look after him; but to what gods she muttered this she had no idea. Gods of that empty sky, perhaps, gods who reigned over those spaces, dispensing a storm here, clement weather there, who answered, or ignored, the prayers of sailors and imaginative women.

  She turned again to Miranda, who smiled back at her expectantly. Cat had talked about needing somebody during the summer, particularly if Eddie took a holiday, as she thought he might. He had not taken a holiday last year, but now he was talking of going to France with a nameless friend about whom Cat knew nothing, not even the gender. If Eddie did this—and Cat was keen to encourage him to do anything that would boost his confidence—then she would certainly be short-handed, particularly during the Festival, when the number of delicatessen-oriented people staying in the area seemed almost to double.

  Miranda could be the solution to this staff problem, so Isabel gave Miranda her telephone number and suggested that she call her the following day. She talked to both Seamus and Miranda during the meal, and they chatted with each other across Isabel while she spoke to the woman opposite her. It was an easy, relaxed atmosphere and the weather held.

  At the end of the meal, people were encouraged to get up from the table and help themselves to coffee in the kitchen.

  Isabel left Seamus and Miranda deep in conversation. Seamus had been in Perth and wanted to go back. Miranda had lived 1 5 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h there for a time, and they had discovered mutual friends whose exploits, related by Seamus, were causing them both hilarity.

  Now you know somebody, Isabel thought with satisfaction, and tomorrow you may have a job. She looked around for Mimi and Joe; they were in conversation at the other end of the table with Malcolm and Nicky Wood, both singers. She did not need to worry about them: the talk, which was already animated, would be about choirs. Mimi sang in the choir of a h
igh Episcopal church in Dallas, one that claimed to possess a holy relic, a fragment of the true cross. Unlikely, thought Isabel, but then people believe in all sorts of things, some even more unlikely than that.

  How many people in the United States believed that they had been abducted by aliens? It was a depressingly large number.

  And the aliens always gave them back! Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort.

  Isabel walked across the lawn towards the kitchen door at the back of the house. There was a chill in the air now, not enough to spoil the evening, but a sign of the advancing night.

  A white night, she thought, like the midsummer nights of St.

  Petersburg, when it never became dark; it was so still; there wasn’t a hint of breeze.

  She moved across the small courtyard and headed toward the kitchen. There were several guests ahead of her: a man in a mustard-coloured linen jacket; a woman in a rather-too-formal dress with a stole across her shoulders; a young man with a high complexion who was regaling them with a story. The man in the linen jacket half turned and caught Isabel’s eye. She knew him but could not remember his name or what he did. He looked at her briefly, obviously in the same position of uncertainty, and smiled before returning his attention to his companions. Then, in the kitchen, there were more guests, coffee cups in hand.

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  Isabel helped herself to coffee and began to move back towards the lawn. Peter and Susie had planned music and she could hear, drifting from one of the rooms further inside the house, the first strains of a fiddle tune. She turned round and went back down a corridor that led to the hall and the staircase.

  The music was coming from a room to the right—it was one of those lilting Scottish fiddle tunes that celebrated somebody’s return or departure from Islay or Skye or somewhere like that, or a battle that took place a long time ago; maybe it was even that curiously named “Neil Gow’s Lament for His Second Wife.” She paused and listened. There was something about this music that always affected her strongly; perhaps because it came from such a particular place. It could not be the music of anywhere else. It was the music of Scotland and it spoke of the country she loved. She closed her eyes. What was Scotland to her? Her place, yes. And it was right that one’s place should make one’s heart stop with longing, particularly when it was as beautiful as was Scotland. The rose of all the world is not for me, MacDiarmid had written. I want for my part / Only the little white rose of Scotland / That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.