Isabel had almost immediately regretted her rudeness, for it 6 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was simple rudeness to embarrass a guest, no matter what provo-cation the guest had offered. It had been a petty action, and not one from which she was likely to benefit. The bonds of friendship might appear strong, but she understood that there was nothing easier to break than friendship, with all its expectations.
One might ignore a friend, or let him down, but you could not do something deliberate to hurt him.
An apology could not be put off. Isabel remembered her father making this point when he considered Japan’s apology to China for what it did in Manchuria. Forty years is slightly late, he had observed, adding, but I suppose one doesn’t want to rush these things.
“Jamie?”
There was a slight hesitation at the other end of the line, which is always a sign of resentment. This was the So it’s you pause.
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath. “You can guess why I’m calling.”
Another moment of silence. Of course he could guess.
“No,” he said.
“About last night, and my bad behaviour. All I can say is that I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Jealousy, maybe.”
He came in quickly. “Why should you be jealous?”
He doesn’t know, she thought. He has no idea. And this should not surprise her.
“I value your friendship, you see,” she said. “One can see other people as a threat to a friendship, and I thought . . . well, I’m afraid I thought that Louise was not in the slightest bit interested in me and that she would cut me out of your life. Yes, I suppose that’s what I felt. Do you think you can understand that?”
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She paused, and she heard Jamie’s breathing. Now there was silence, each uncertain whose turn it was to speak.
“Nobody is going to cut anybody out,” Jamie began. “Anyway, things did not go well last night. It had nothing to do with you. We had an argument even before we came to see you. Then things got worse, and I’m afraid that’s more or less it.”
Isabel looked up at the ceiling. She had not dared to hope for this, but it was exactly what she had wished for, subcon-sciously perhaps, and it had occurred much sooner than she would have thought possible. People fell in and out of love rather quickly, of course; it could happen within minutes.
“What a pity,” whispered Isabel. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re not,” said Jamie sharply.
“No,” said Isabel. “I’m not.” She paused. “You’ll find some -
body else. There are plenty of girls.”
“I don’t want plenty of girls,” Jamie retorted. “I want Cat.”
C H A P T E R E I G H T
E
AND SALVATORE?” asked Isabel. “Tell me all about Salvatore.”
“Charming,” said Cat, meeting Isabel’s eye. “Exactly as I told you he was.”
They were sitting in the gazebo in Isabel’s back garden that Sunday afternoon, shortly after Cat’s return from Italy. It was an unusually warm day for Edinburgh, where summer is unpredictable and where the occasional warm day is something to be savoured. Isabel was used to this, and although she bemoaned, as everybody did, the tendency of the sky to disappear behind sheets of fast-moving cloud, she found a temperate climate more to her taste than a Mediterranean one. Weather was a test of attitude, she felt: had Auden not pointed that out? Nice people, he observed, were nice about the weather; nasty people were nasty about it.
Cat was a heliophile, if there was such a word for a sun-worshipper, she thought. Italy in the summer must have suited her perfectly; a climate of short shadows and dry breezes. Cat liked beaches and warm seas, while Isabel found such things F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
7 1
dull. She could think of nothing worse than sitting for hours under an umbrella, an open invitation to sandflies, looking out to sea. She wondered why it was that people did not talk on beaches; they sat, they lay prone, they read, but did they engage in conversation? Isabel thought not.
She remembered, years before, at the end of her spell at Georgetown, a visit she had paid to the Bahamas with her mother’s sister, the one who lived in Palm Beach. This aunt had bought, almost on impulse, an apartment in Nassau, to which she travelled once or twice a year. She had made there a group of bridge-playing friends, bored and unhappy tax exiles, and Isabel had met these people at drinks parties. They had little to say, and there was little to be said about them. And on one occasion, visiting the house of one of these bridge couples, she had been seized with a sudden existential horror. The house had white carpets and white furniture and, most significantly, no books. And they sat on the terrace, which was just above a small private beach, and looked out towards the ocean, and nothing was said, because nobody could think of anything to speak about.
“Beaches,” said Isabel to Cat.
“Beaches?”
“I was thinking about Italy, and the weather, and beaches came into my mind.” She looked at Cat. “And I suddenly remembered going to the Bahamas and meeting some people who lived on a beach.”
“Beach people?”
Isabel laughed. “Not in that sense. Not people who had a tent or whatever and let their hair get full of salt and all the rest.
No, these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble 7 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import, and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one.
“He had lived in England and had left the country because he couldn’t bear to pay taxes to a socialist government, or to any government, I suspect. And there they were on their Caribbean island, sitting on their terrace, with their heads full of nothing very much.
“They had a daughter, who was a young teenager when I saw her. She was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. So they withdrew her from her expensive school in England and brought her back to the island. She took up with a local boy whom the parents wouldn’t let into the house, with its white carpets and all the rest. They tried to stop her, but they couldn’t. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either. But they didn’t want their daughter’s baby, and I later heard that they just pretended that the baby didn’t exist.
It crawled around on the white carpets, but they didn’t really see it.”
Cat looked at Isabel. She was used to her relative’s musings, but this one surprised her. Usually Isabel’s stories had a clear moral point, but she was not sure what the moral point of this one was. Emptiness, perhaps; or the need for a purpose in life; or the immorality of tax havens. Or even babies and white carpets.
“Salvatore was quite charming,” said Cat. “He took us all out for a meal at a restaurant in the hills. It was one of the places where they give you very little choice but just bring course after course.”
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“They’re generous people, the Italians,” Isabel remarked.
“And his father was very kind, too,” went on Cat. “We went to their house and met all the relatives. Aunts, uncles, and so on. Crowds of them.”
“I see,” said Isabel. There was still the question of Salvatore’s father’s occupation. “And did you find out what the family business was?”
“I asked,” said Cat. “I asked one of the uncles. We were sitting under the pergola in the garden, having lunch—a large table with about twenty people at it. I asked Salvatore’s uncle.”