Perhaps he had intended the remark to be a compliment, or perhaps it had meant nothing very much. But he had said other British ladies, and that put her into the category of artistic spinsters and eccentrics who haunted places like Fiesole; not a glamorous set, but faded, chintzy, dreamy exponents of Botti-celli and Tuscan cookery; maiden aunts, actual or in the making. He had invited her to travel to the Highlands in his Bugatti, and she had almost accepted; but this, she thought, is how he sees me. I would be company; a guide; somebody to read the map and explain the massacre of Glencoe. And I, my head momentarily turned, had thought that I could possibly be of romantic or even sexual interest to this man.
The waiter arrived with the first course. He placed the plate in front of her, scallops on a bed of shredded red and green peppers. As she looked at her plate, she teetered on the edge of self-pity, and then pulled back. Why should I agonise? she asked herself. Why should I always weigh the rights and wrongs of things? What if I just acted? What if I became, for a short time, the huntress and showed him that I was not what he imagined?
What if I made a conquest?
She looked up. The waiter had a pepper mill in his hand and was offering her pepper. This always irritated her; that the pro-prietors of restaurants should not trust their pepper mills to the hands of their guests. But it was not the waiter’s fault, and she dismissed the thought.
She looked across the table. “I’d like to think about your offer of that trip,” she said. “Next week perhaps?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She studied his reaction, watching for any sign. But he gave little away—little beyond the slightest twitch of a smile at the sides of his mouth and a brief change in the light in his eyes, a flicker, a change in reflection, brought about, no doubt, by a trick of light, a movement of the head.
C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N
E
JAMIE DID NOT LIKE playing for the ballet. From where he sat in the orchestra pit, just beneath the overhang of the stage, he found the sound of the dancers’ feet disconcerting. This is what it would be like to live, he thought, on the first floor, with noisy neighbours on the second. But it was work, and well-paid work at that, and he thought it better than listening to his pupils. That afternoon, on the day after Isabel’s dinner with Tomasso, he had played for the Scottish Ballet in a matinée performance, and had agreed to meet Isabel in the Festival Theatre café after the show.
She had to talk to him, she explained. And he had begun to ask, “About . . . ,” and then had stopped, because he knew what it was about, without having to ask. “Tell me when we meet,” he said, and added, as an afterthought, “You haven’t done anything unwise, have you, Isabel?”
Isabel realised that the answer to that was yes, but did not say so. She had virtually agreed to go off to the Highlands with an almost complete stranger (not that she intended to tell Jamie about that—just yet); she had impersonated a medium; she had reduced Graeme, on first meeting, to a state of tight-lipped 1 8 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h enmity; all of which, she thought, was unwise. And while her sense of moral obligation lay behind two of these bad decisions, behind the other one lay nothing but a sudden urge to show bravado. And yet that very act, the reckless flirtation with Tomasso (a flirtation on her side, now, if not yet on his), was the one unwise thing of the three that she did not regret. Indeed, the mere thought of it was pleasurable: a shameless, erotic challenge, a delectable fantasy. My Italian lover, she would be able to say; and then, with regret: Yes, I used him, I confess I did. Of course, she would never be able to utter that to anybody, although she might think it in private, and find comfort in the thought. My Italian lover— how many women would love to be able to say that to themselves, when confronted with the hum-drum, the brute limitations of their lives: Yes, I know, I know—
but I have had an Italian lover.
In the café at the Festival Theatre, Isabel looked out through the glass wall to the Royal College of Surgeons on the other side of the road. A small cluster of men and women was emerging from the gate at the side of the college, examinees poring over a piece of paper. One of the men jabbed at the paper with a finger, making some remark to the others. There was a shaking of heads, and Isabel felt a pang of sympathy: What had the poor man suggested? Removing the wrong organ? These were doctors who came from their hospital posts all over the world to attempt the fellowship examinations, and only a small number passed. She had heard a surgeon friend comment on it: seven—
out of sixty hopefuls, sometimes—invited to join the Fellows in some inner sanctum, the rest politely dispersed. The doctor who had gestured to the paper looked down at the ground; a woman beside him put her hand on his shoulder to comfort him. There would be a melancholy homecoming.
F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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Jamie slipped into the chair beside her; she turned and he was there, smiling in the way she found so appealing. “Arvo Pärt,” he said.
“Very slow,” she said. “Silences. Repetitive pätterns.”
He laughed. “Exactly. But I enjoy it, you know. This ballet we’ve just done uses a piece he wrote called Psalom. Gorgeous ärchitecture.”
“So you’re feeling in a good mood?”
He scratched his head and looked out onto the street. “I think so,” he said. “Yes, in fact I am in a good mood. Are you going to spoil it for me? Has something happened?”
“Let’s go for a walk,” said Isabel. “I feel a bit cooped up. We could talk while we’re walking. Do you mind?”
Jamie left his bassoon with a young woman at the ticket desk and joined Isabel on the pavement outside the theatre.
They crossed the road and made their way down Nicolson Street to South Bridge. They passed Thin’s Bookshop, as Isabel still called it, and turned down Infirmary Street. The Old College of the university towered above and behind them, a great quadrangle of grey stone. Above the dome, a gleaming statue of a naked youth, torch in hand, caught the late afternoon sun, gold against the high background of cloud. Isabel tended to look up when she walked round Edinburgh, because that was where the forgotten delights were—the carved stone thistles, the Scottish gargoyles straddling roof gables, the all but obliterated signs of the nineteenth century: pens, inks, loans—a palimpsest of the life and commerce of the town.
Jamie was talking about the Arvo Pärt and about his next engagement, a concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Isabel listened. She had her own topics which she wanted to raise with him, but Jamie was still exhilarated by the perfor-1 8 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h mance and she was content to let him talk. At the end of Infirmary Street the road dipped down sharply to the Cowgate, a cobbled slide for incautious cars and pedestrians. They branched off behind the morgue, heading for the stone steps that descended beside a shabby tenement block. There was broken glass on the steps and the large abandoned buckle of a belt.
“Things happen in this city,” said Jamie, glancing at the buckle.
“They do,” said Isabel. “You turn a corner, take a few steps, and you’re in a different world.” She pointed behind her to the statue on the high dome of the university. “He’s carrying a lighted torch for a reason.”
Jamie glanced behind him and for a moment his expression clouded over. He looked at Isabel. Then he stared at the wall of the tenement beside them, a place of poverty and hardship still, and at the steps worn down by the feet of centuries.