Kirsty was in for a rude awakening, with her handsome young mafioso husband. He would want a compliant, unquestioning wife, who would look the other way when it came to his dealings with his cronies. A Scotswoman was unlikely to understand this; she would expect equality and consideration, which this Salvatore would not give her once they were married. It was a disaster in the making, and Isabel thought that Cat simply could not see it, as she had been unable to see through Toby, her previous boyfriend; he of the Lladró porcelain looks and the tendency to wear crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers. Perhaps Cat would come back from Italy with an Italian of her own.
Now that would be interesting.
C H A P T E R T W O
E
WHEN IT CAME TO a Queen’s Hall concert, Isabel Dalhousie had a strategy. The hall had been a church, and the upstairs gallery, which ran round three sides of the hall, was designed to be uncomfortable. The Church of Scotland had always believed that one should sit up straight, especially when the minister was in full flow, and this principle had been embodied in its Scottish ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, the upstairs seats prevented any leaning back, and indeed were inimical to too much spreading out in any direction. For this reason, Isabel would attend concerts in the Queen’s Hall only if she could arrange a ticket for downstairs, where ordinary seats, rather than pews, were set out in the main body of the kirk, and only in the first few rows which afforded a reasonable view of the stage.
Her friend Jamie had arranged the ticket for her that evening, and he knew all about her requirements.
“Third row from the front,” he assured her on the telephone. “On the aisle. Perfect.”
“And who’ll be sitting next to me?” Isabel asked. “Perfection implies an agreeable neighbour.”
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Jamie laughed. “Somebody wonderful,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what I asked for.”
“Last time I was in the Queen’s Hall,” Isabel observed, “I had that strange man from the National Library. You know, the one who’s the expert on Highland place names, and who fidgets.
Nobody will sit next to him normally, and I believe he was actually hit over the head with a rolled-up programme at a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert—out of sheer irritation. No excuse, of course, but understandable. I have, of course, never hit anybody with a programme. Not once.”
Jamie laughed. This was a typical Isabel comment, and it delighted him. Everybody else was so literal; she could turn a situation on its head and render it painfully funny by some peculiar observation. “Maybe it’s the way the music takes him,”
he said. “My pupils fidget a lot.”
Jamie was a musician, a bassoonist who supplemented his earnings as a member of a chamber orchestra with the proceeds of teaching. His pupils were mostly teenagers, who traipsed up the stairs of his Stockbridge flat once a week for their lessons.
For the most part they were promising players, but there were several who attended under parental duress, and these were the ones who fidgeted or looked out of the window.
Isabel enjoyed a close friendship with Jamie—or at least as close a friendship as could flourish across an age gap of fifteen years. She had met him during the six months that he had spent with Cat, and she had been disappointed when her niece and this good-looking young man, with his sallow complexion and his en brosse haircut, had separated. It was entirely Cat’s doing, and it had taken all of Isabel’s self-restraint not to upbraid her niece for what she saw as a disastrous mistake. Jamie was a gift: a wonderful, gentle gift from the gods—sent straight down from 1 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Parnassus—and Cat was walking away from him. How could she possibly do it?
Over the months that followed, the torch which Jamie continued to carry for Cat had been kept alight by Isabel. She had barely discussed the matter with him, but there was an unspoken understanding that Jamie was still part of the family, as it were, and that by remaining in contact with Isabel, the chance of a resumption of the affair was at least kept alive. But the bond between them had gone deeper than that. It appeared that Jamie needed a confidante, and Isabel fulfilled that role with instinctive sympathy. And for her part, she enjoyed Jamie’s company immensely: he sang while she accompanied him on the piano; she cooked meals for him; they gossiped—all of which he appeared to enjoy as much as she did.
She was content with what she had in this friendship. She knew that she could telephone Jamie at any time and that he would come up from his flat in Saxe-Coburg Street and share a glass of wine and talk. From time to time they went out for dinner together, or to a concert when Jamie had spare tickets. He took it for granted that she would be at every performance of his chamber orchestra, in Edinburgh or in Glasgow, and she was, although Isabel did not enjoy going through to Glasgow. Such an unsettling city, she confessed. And Jamie smiled: what was unsettling about Glasgow was that it was real; there was a meatiness about life in Glasgow that was quite different from the rarefied atmosphere of Edinburgh. And of course he liked that: he had studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and remembered a student life of late-night parties and bars and dinners in cheap Indian restaurants off the Byres Road, all against the smell of the river and the sound of the ships and the factories.
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Now, sitting in her seat in the third row—as promised—
Isabel studied the programme for that evening’s concert. It was a charity concert in aid of a Middle East relief fund, and an eclectic selection of local musicians had offered their services.
There was a Haydn cello concerto, a ragbag of Bach, and a selection of anthems from the Edinburgh Academy Chorus. Jamie’s chamber orchestra was not performing that night, but he was playing the contrabassoon in an impromptu ensemble that was to accompany the singers. Isabel ran her eye down the list of performers: almost all of them were known to her.
She settled back in her seat and glanced up towards the gallery. A young child, the younger sister perhaps of one of the members of the Academy Chorus, was gazing down over the parapet, met her eye, and lifted a hand in a hesitant wave. Isabel waved back, and smiled. Behind the child, she saw the figure of the man from the National Library—he went to every concert, and fidgeted at them all.
The hall was now almost full, and only a few latecomers were still to find their way to their seats. Isabel looked down at her programme and then, discreetly, glanced at her neighbour on the left. She was a middle-aged woman with her hair tied back in a bun and a vaguely disapproving expression on her face.
A thin-faced man, drained of colour, sat beside her, staring up at the ceiling. The man glanced at the woman, and then looked away. The woman looked at the man, and then half turned to face Isabel on the pretext of adjusting the red paisley shawl she had about her shoulders.
“Such an interesting programme,” whispered Isabel. “A real treat.”
The woman’s expression softened. “We hear so little Haydn,”
she said, almost conspiratorially. “They don’t give us enough.”
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“I suppose not,” said Isabel, but she wondered: Precisely who took it upon themselves to ration Haydn?
“They need to wake up,” muttered the man. “When did they last do The Creation? Can you remember? I can’t.”
Isabel looked back at her programme, as if to assess the quota of Haydn, but the lights were dimmed and the members of a string quartet appeared from the door at the back of the stage to take their places. There was enthusiastic applause led, it seemed to Isabel, by her neighbours.