“And?” She imagined the uncle saying that he was not sure what his brother did; or that he had forgotten. One could not forget such a thing, just as one could not forget one’s address, as a Russian once claimed to Isabel when she asked him where he lived. He was frightened, poor man; those were times when one might not want one’s address in a foreigner’s address book, but it might have been better for him to say so, rather than to claim that he had forgotten it.
“He said it was shoes.”
Isabel was silent. Shoes. Italian shoes: elegant, beautifully designed, but always, always too small for Isabel’s feet. My Scottish-American feet, she thought, so much larger than Italian feet.
Cat smiled at her; she had dispelled the suspicions which her aunt had expressed over Salvatore’s family business. Perhaps it had been embarrassment over shoes, which were, after all, somewhat prosaic items.
“And what else did you do?” asked Isabel at last. “Apart from these lunch parties with Salvatore and the Salvatore family. Turismo? ”
7 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“We went to see Etna.”
“On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking,” said Isabel.
“Lawrence wrote that in his curious snake poem. You know the one, where a snake comes to his water trough, and he’s in his pyjamas for the heat, and he throws a rock at the snake. Auden never threw rocks at snakes, and that’s the crucial difference, isn’t it: writers who would throw rocks at snakes and those who wouldn’t. Hemingway would, wouldn’t he?” She smiled at Cat, who was shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, and looking at her with what Isabel always described as her patient look.
“I digress. I know,” Isabel went on. “But I always think of Etna smoking. And of Lawrence in his pyjamas.”
Cat took control of the conversation. Isabel could talk for hours about anything, unless stopped. “That was with a cousin of Salvatore’s, Tomasso. He’s from Palermo. They live in a large Baroque palazzo. He’s fun. He took me to all sorts of places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”
Isabel sat quite still. When Cat talked like this, about men being fun, it meant that she was interested in them, as she had been interested in Toby, with his crushed-strawberry trousers and his tedious skiing talk; as she had been interested in Geoff, the army officer who drank too much at parties and engaged in childish pranks, such as gluing people’s hats to the hatstand; as she had been interested in Henry, and David, and perhaps others.
“Tomasso’s a rally driver,” said Cat. “He drives an old Bugatti. It’s a beautiful car—red and silver.”
Isabel was noncommittal. At least Tomasso was at a safe distance . . .
“And he’s bringing the car over to Scotland soon,” said Cat.
F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
7 5
“It’s being brought over by train and ferry. He wants to drive it around the Highlands and see a bit of Edinburgh. He thought he might stay in Edinburgh for a few weeks.”
“When?” asked Isabel. There was resignation in her voice.
“Next week, I think,” said Cat. “Or the week after that. He’s going to call me and let me know.”
There was little more to be said on the subject. As they talked about the delicatessen and about what had happened there over the week, Isabel’s thoughts returned to one of the central issues of her moral life. She had determined long ago not to interfere in Cat’s affairs, no matter what the temptation to do so was. It was very easy to see what was best for one’s family, particularly when one did not have many relatives, but she understood how this offended the principle of autonomy, which holds, so stubbornly, that we must each be left to live our own lives as we see fit. This did not mean that we could do anything we liked—far from it—but it did mean that we had to make our own decisions as to what to do. And if this meant that we made bad choices, then we would have to be left with the making of those choices. Cat saw her destiny in men who would make her unhappy, precisely because they were inconstant, and selfish, and narcissistic. That was what she wanted to do, and she had to be allowed to do it.
“You’re fond of him?” Isabel asked quietly, and Cat, knowing what the question was about, was guarded in her response. Perhaps she was fond of him. She would see.
Isabel said nothing. She wondered for a moment what Tomasso would be like. Of course, if one bore in mind that he drove an old Bugatti and lived in a Baroque palazzo, then the answer was clear. He would be stylish, raffish no doubt, and 7 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he would make Cat unhappy, as she had been unhappy with the other men. And Jamie would be unhappy too, and would spend hours anxiously imagining Cat and Tomasso together, in the silver and red Bugatti, somewhere in Fife or Perthshire, on narrow, exhilarating roads.
C H A P T E R N I N E
E
SHE HAD SUGGESTED to Ian that they meet at her house, but when he telephoned her it was with a counter-invitation.
He would like to take her to lunch, if he might, at the Scottish Arts Club in Rutland Square.
“They do mackerel fillets for me,” he said. “Mackerel fillets and lettuce. But you can have something more substantial.”
Isabel knew the Arts Club. She had friends who were members and she knew the club president, a dapper antiques dealer with an exquisitely pointed moustache. She had even thought of joining, but done nothing about it, and so her visits to the club were restricted to the occasional lunch and the annual Burns Supper. The Burns Supper, which took place on or about the anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth, was of variable quality. In a year when there was a good speaker, the address to the Immortal Memory could be moving. But the occasion could rapidly drift into maudlin reflections on the ploughman poet and his carousing in Ayrshire, nothing of which Scotland could be proud, she thought. There was nothing edifying in the profound consumption of whisky, she felt. Every Scottish poet, it seemed, had drunk too much, or written about drink, or written 7 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h nonsense while under its influence. How much had been lost as a result—great screeds of unwritten poetry, whole decades of literature; lives unsung, hopes unrealised. And the same could be said of Scottish composers, or at least some of them—the sixth Earl of Kellie, for example, who had composed such fine fiddle music but who had often been drunk and who, it was said, laughed so much at his own jokes that he would turn purple.
That, of course, was a marvellous social detail; one could forgive a great deal in a man who turned purple in such circumstances.
One might even love such a figure.
Not that she laid the blame at the door of the Arts Club, before which she now stood, awaiting admission by one of the staff. Members had their own keys, but guests must wait until a member arrived or the secretary heard the bell. Isabel pressed the bell again and then looked back, over her shoulder, at the Rutland Square Gardens. Rutland Square was one of the finest squares in Georgian Edinburgh, tucked away at the west end of Princes Street, behind the great red sandstone edifice of the Caledonian Hotel. The gardens in the centre were not large, but had a number of well-established trees, which shaded the stone of the surrounding buildings. In spring the grass was covered with a riot of crocuses, impossible purples and yellows, and in summer, at lunchtime, it was lain upon during brief moments of sun by people from the nearby offices, pale secretaries and clerks in their shirtsleeves, just as Isabel and her friends at the Ladies’ College in George Square had stretched out on the grass and watched the students from the university, the boys in particular, and waited for their real lives to start.