The Right Attitude to Rain id-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Cat was interested. “Will she be all right with Eddie?” she asked. “You know how he’s frightened of people.”

  Isabel did not know how to answer that question. She knew very little about Miranda, now that she came to think of it. All she knew was that she came from Australia and wanted to work.

  But could she be trusted? Of course she could be, provided, of course, that one could trust somebody of whose past one knew nothing and of whose present one could not say much more than freckles, an engaging smile and an apparent optimism. PerT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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  haps that was a good enough basis for trust, even in a world in which people destroyed the fragile sense of self of young men like Eddie and thought, one assumed, nothing of it.

  “She seems nice enough.” That poor, overworked word, she thought, nice.

  “I’ll try her now,” said Cat, taking the piece of paper on which Isabel had written Miranda’s telephone number.

  Isabel left, pausing at Eddie’s side on the way out. The young man was standing disconsolately, staring out of the window, his gaze unfocused. She took his hand, which felt warm to her, and a bit damp. “We’re very fond of you, you know,” she whispered. “Cat. Me. We’re very fond of you.”

  She gave his hand a squeeze and, after a moment, she felt him return the pressure, not very convincingly, but detectably nonetheless.

  M I M I WA S I N T H E G A R D E N when Isabel returned to the house. Isabel went out to join her, having seen her from the kitchen window, standing beside a large clump of flowering azaleas near the small wooden summer house.

  “Something been digging here,” said Mimi, pointing to the ground at her feet. “Look. A mole?”

  Isabel looked down at the scratchings in the lawn. A few lines of dark earth had been scattered across a small area of grass and a bulb, dug from the edge of the flowerbed, had been left against a crenellation of mud. She looked for the familiar signs: a feather, perhaps; a fragment of bone from a vole or shrew, or even a chicken leg salvaged from kitchen pickings, but there was nothing.

  “Brother Fox,” she said. “This is his territory.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Mimi looked enquiringly at Isabel, the edge of the summer house reflected in the lens of her glasses.

  “Brother Fox?”

  “Our urban fox,” said Isabel. “We call him Brother Fox because . . . well, I suppose it’s because he has to have a name and Grace and I feel that we know him quite well. So it’s Brother Fox.”

  “St. Francis . . .”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “There is a Franciscan ring to it. Brother Sun, wasn’t it? And why not?”

  “No reason at all,” said Mimi. “One of my favourite saints.

  You know that picture, do you, the one in Florence, where the saint stands with his arms out and all the birds are at his feet—

  those strange, naïvely painted birds, like little feathered boxes.”

  She paused. “I’d like to see him, this Brother Fox of yours. Will he make an appearance?”

  Isabel looked about the garden. “There’s something unpredictable about him. Sometimes, though, I feel as if he’s watching me. I just get that feeling.”

  “And he is? He is really watching you?”

  Isabel knew it sounded unlikely, but it was true. “Yes. It’s happened time and time again. I might be in my study, working, and I feel that there are eyes on me—eyes outside. And if I look up I see Brother Fox out in the garden, or see a flash of gold, which is him. He’s very beautiful, you see. Reddish-gold. A most beautiful creature.”

  Isabel reached out and touched one of the flowers on the azalea bush. Nature was so beguiling in many of its corners; it was the tiny details that were important: the colour of these azaleas, somewhere between pink and red; the red-gold of fox fur. Why should we alone find the world beautiful? Or did 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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  Brother Fox appreciate what he saw about him, and love it, as we did? No, we should not make the mistake of anthropomor-phism: the world for him was really not much more than a struggle for food, for life; a matter of genetic survival against all the competing genes; just struggle. And we were the enemy, with our dogs and our gas and our huntsmen with rifles; all terror and pain for foxes. But Brother Fox was not scared of her; he was wary, when he watched, but not scared.

  The azalea was next to a mahonia bush, with its yellow flowers and those spiky leaves, so different from the azalea. Isabel’s hand moved on to touch the mahonia; it reminded her of holly, but it was more beautiful.

  “I occasionally dream of Brother Fox,” she said to Mimi. “In my dreams he can speak. It’s very strange, but not at all odd in the dream, you know. He speaks with a slightly high-pitched, rather refined Scottish voice, but once he spoke French, and that surprised me. He used subjunctives and I remembered thinking how remarkable it was that an animal should have the subjunctive.” She used the construction “have the subjunctive”

  without thinking that it might have sounded strange to Mimi.

  Scots said “I have the Gaelic” when they could speak Gaelic.

  Mimi laughed. “And what did he say in these dreams?

  Small talk?”

  Isabel searched her memory. Dreams are lodged in a very short-term part of the memory, but she had committed these to more permanent storage because they had been so unusual.

  Her last conversation with Brother Fox had been something about how we control our lives and how contingency plays a part in what we are. She remembered saying to him that he was a fox—and he had agreed—and that the pattern of his life was determined by that brute fact of biology. But then he had said, 1 6 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h And so is yours, and she had felt indignant that a fox should call into question her free will. Their conversation had ended in an atmosphere of polite distance, which Isabel regretted, as she had had a sense of the preciousness of speaking with a fox.

  She told Mimi this, and Mimi said, “But he was right, wasn’t he? Or you were, rather. Conversations in our dreams are really conversations with ourselves, aren’t they? Have you ever thought of it that way?”

  “No, but you’re right. Internal rhetoric—that’s what philosophers would call it.” A mahonia leaf pricked the tip of her finger, just slightly, but she said to herself: I must be careful of sharp things. Internal rhetoric. “But . . . but surely, we don’t have to agree with what is said by the people to whom we are talking in our dreams? Of course we may put words into their mouths—we are after all the director of our dreams—”

  “And producer,” interjected Mimi.

  “Yes, and producer. But what is said in the dream by other people may just be what we think those other people are likely to say. The fact that we write the lines for them doesn’t mean that we agree with the sentiments behind the lines, does it?”

  Mimi felt that she needed time to think about this. Philosophy, she had always thought, was often just a matter of common sense; a matter of finding the words to describe what is, or, in some cases, what should be. What Isabel had just said might have sounded complicated, but in reality it was not. The play-wright, the novelist did not endorse what their characters said—

  that seemed clear enough. But where did it all come from?

  Every word of Shakespeare was, after all, Shakespeare; if something came from the mind of the writer, then it was there in that mind, even if only as a possibility. And surely the insights of psy-chology underlined the point that what we talked about was 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 we were interested in, and, sometimes, what we believe—

  even if we said we didn’t! That was why we sometimes criticised others for doing exactly what we would want to do ourselves but did not dare—which meant that the writer might not be believed in protesting that the words on the page were nothing to do to with him
. They could well be.

  Mimi thought of somebody she knew who often spoke of a mutual friend’s tendency to consult the plastic surgeon. “Such a conservationist,” the critic said. “She deserves some sort of award.”

  And Mimi had politely observed that perhaps she, the critic, would like to do the same thing, which had not gone down well, because, she thought, it was true. But it had stopped the remarks.

  “Sometimes we say things which are the—” Mimi began, but Isabel, who had not heard her, had started to say something else.

  “I know that the dreams of others are tedious,” she said.

  “And I know I shouldn’t bore you with these things. But I had an extremely odd dream last night.”

  “About Brother Fox?” asked Mimi.

  “No,” said Isabel. “About Tom and Angie. Your friends.”

  “You must have been thinking about them during the day,”

  offered Mimi. “I find that what I dream about very much reflects what has been on my mind that day. It happens all the time.”

  Isabel turned away from the mahonia and faced Mimi. “It was very odd,” she said. “Quite disconcerting, in fact.”

  “One shouldn’t let dreams worry you,” said Mimi reassuringly. “Everybody does disconcerting things in dreams.”

  “Oh, I behaved myself,” said Isabel. “I don’t think I had much to do or say in the dream. I was there, I suppose, because 1 7 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h I saw what happened. But I didn’t do anything. I was just standing there, a bit shocked, I think.”

  Mimi raised an eyebrow. She waited for Isabel to continue.

  “We were somewhere over in the west of Scotland,” Isabel went on. “I think that it was on the Mull of Kintyre, or somewhere like that. We were in a house near the sea, and there was a room with one of those extraordinary cases of little stuffed animals dressed up in outfits, riding tiny bicycles, playing croquet.

  You know those strange things? The Victorians loved them.

  They would gas kittens, send them off to the taxidermist, and then put them into a sort of tableau vivant, or tableau mort, I suppose. An orchestra of kittens, with minute instruments. A court scene with kitten jurors and kitten lawyers.”

  Mimi made a face. She liked cats, and indeed had been the owner of a dynasty of distinguished cats, including Arthur Brown, an immense and dignified furry ball, who had been much admired by all in that part of Dallas, and who had died, suddenly, on the kitchen floor, of a heart attack, much as overworked busi-nessmen dropped on the golf course. “I don’t approve . . .”

  “Neither do I,” Isabel supplied. “But there was one of those cases in the room, and then in came Tom and Angie. They looked at the case, and walked out of the room. Then Angie came back in alone and started to read the Scotsman on the sofa. She turned to me and said, ‘I’ve killed Tom, you know.’ And that was it.”

  Mimi laughed. “Imaginative stuff!”

  “I woke up feeling quite sad,” said Isabel.

  “One would.” Mimi paused. “Of course there’s a motive, isn’t there? She would be better off if she did that. And the university would be worse off.”

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  Isabel did not see what this had to do with SMU, and she asked Mimi to explain.

  “Tom said years ago that he was going to make a major bene-faction to Southern Methodist,” said Mimi. “To the law school, in particular, but also to the Meadows School of the Arts. But then when Angie came along he stopped talking about this. Joe was very disappointed. He thought that she had got round him in some way. Anyway, all the law school people decided to take the long view. They thought that Angie would not be around for ever and that once she had got whatever settlement she had in mind, Tom would come back to the idea of giving money to the university. Joe hopes that too, but he’s not so sure that Angie is a temporary fixture. He thinks that Tom would be more likely to go first. So there you have it.”

  “Of course,” Isabel said wryly, “that gives people a motive to dispose of her, rather than Tom.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mimi. “But remember that the people who would benefit are all very respectable. They wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that.” Of course they might dream of it, she thought, but not consider it. But Isabel would know what she meant.

  “No,” said Isabel. “Of course not. But I’m afraid that I can see Angie doing what she did in my dream. She just could, couldn’t she?”

  “No,” said Mimi. “I don’t think that she has the imagination.”

  She paused, looking at her watch. “But, anyway, Isabel, this sort of thing simply doesn’t happen. Outside novels, of course.”

  “Novels have nothing to do with real life?”

  “Very little,” said Mimi. “And that’s what makes them such fun.”

  C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

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  THAT FRIDAY was the day on which they were due to go off to stay with Tom and Angie. Joe and Mimi left in the morning, as they planned to visit Traquair House beforehand. Traquair, the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, had a maze (“Joe will get lost, so we won’t be doing that,” said Mimi) and a library (“Joe will spend the whole visit there”) and the cradle in which James VI slept as an infant, a carved rocking cradle in which the future king had been laid by his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.

  “I feel so sorry for her,” said Mimi. “What a difficult country this must have been. All that plotting and intrigue.”

  Isabel was sympathetic—up to a point. It was unfortunate having one’s head chopped off by a scheming, suspicious cousin, certainly, but Mary had been no stranger to intrigue.

  “She did a fair amount of scheming herself,” she observed. “And then there were those men . . .”

  It was a non sequitur, she knew, but it seemed to add to the picture of misfortune. Mimi, though, was not going to let that pass. “But she never really had much choice,” she said. “How old was she when she married the Dauphin? Fifteen, wasn’t it?

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  And she’d been betrothed to him at the age of six or something like that. Today we’d call that child abuse.”

  “The Dauphin wasn’t the problem, of course. That was just sad. It was the subsequent husbands.”

  Mimi raised a finger. She used to be able to quote several lines of the poem that Mary wrote on the death of Francis but now it was gone. Poetry went; no matter how fervently one wished it would stay, it went. She closed her eyes. By day, by night, I think of him—that came into it. He had doted on her, that little boy, and she had loved him in return, but rather as a sister would love her little brother, the child groom with his child bride. Her elegy to him had the drum-beat of real grief in its lines.

  “And Darnley,” said Isabel.

  Mimi sighed. “You know, it always surprises me. People say that they can’t understand why she chose to get mixed up with Darnley. But surely it’s obvious. Or at least I think it is. Darnley was handsome, and he was the only man around who was taller than she was. He was also fond of a party.”

  “I would have thought those provided good enough reason.

  Women like handsome men who are fun. And then, a little bit later, they realise their mistake.”

  “Exactly,” said Mimi. “Getting involved with anyone for their looks alone is folly. Sheer folly.”

  “And yet people do it, don’t they? It’s another example of human frailty, I suppose.” Isabel thought: If Jamie did not look like he did, would I feel the way I do about him? What if Jamie were short, or overweight, or had an unflattering profile? Would I love him? These thoughts unsettled her. John Liamor had been good-looking—and had made use of the fact. He had that 1 7 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dark hair that the Irish can carry off so well, and chiselled features and, of course, I loved him for that. Of course I did. She remembered the poem t
hat Yeats had written to Anne Gregory about how only God would love somebody for herself and not her yellow hair.

  She knew that she would not feel the way she did about Jamie if he were not good-looking. And that, she thought, was a dispiriting conclusion, for it meant that it was really a love of beauty that was at work; we love the beautiful, and we find it in a person. The affection one feels for a person—that familiar, solid loyalty that grows around those to whom we have become accustomed, or on whom we have come to depend—is different from love, or at least from romantic love. It was a compromise; the ersatz coffee that we drink when the real is unobtainable.

  Mimi brought an end to these thoughts. “Whatever miscalculations she made,” she said, “Mary was a brave woman. Have you read her last letter, the one that she sent to Henry III? I find it terribly moving, that letter.”

  Isabel had, and recalled the dignity of the sentences in which she describes the shabby behaviour of those who had secured her execution; of how they had kept from the Queen of Scots her chaplain, so that he could not come to hear her confession and give her the comfort of the last sacrament. And how she sent to Henry two precious stones as talismans against illness; and the awful finality of the sentence, Wednesday, at two in the morning. It was almost unbearable, just to read, but worse was to come in the letter which Robert Wynkfielde wrote about the execution: a testament to her bravery and dignity, as well as to the loyalty of dogs; for Mary’s little dog was found to be hiding in her skirts, unwilling to leave the body of its mistress, and had had to be washed of the Queen’s blood. And that, thought 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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  Isabel, was how it all ended in Scotland. We had a stirring history, which people romanticised, but at the end of the day it ended in blood.

  She might take Mimi, she thought, to visit her friend Rosalind Marshall, who had written about Scottish queens. They had spoken about Darnley together in the supermarket in Morningside, of all places, when Isabel, who had been reading his biography at the time, had asked Rosalind’s opinion.