What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was? But it was more than that. It was a glimpse of what life might be if there were no disharmony, no loss, no death. She wanted to reach out, to touch his cheek and say, Jamie, my beautiful Jamie, but she could not, of course. She could neither say what she wanted to say, nor do what she wanted to do. Such is the lot of the philosopher, and most of the rest of us, too, if we are honest with ourselves.
When Jamie spoke, he spoke quietly. “Just keep out of it, Isabel,” he said, between clenched teeth. “Just mind your own business.”
She drew back, shocked by his intensity. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was only trying . . .”
“Please shut up,” said Jamie, his voice raised. “Just shut up.”
His words cut into her, hung in the air. She looked anxiously in the direction of the neighbouring table. There was no sign of anything having been heard, but he must have heard, the man with the book.
Then Jamie pushed his chair back, noisily, and stood up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t feel in the mood for dinner tonight.”
She could not believe it. “You’re going?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
She sat alone at the table, frozen in her embarrassment.
The waiter came to the table swiftly and discreetly pushed Jamie’s chair back against the table. His manner was sympathetic. And then, crossing quietly from the other side of the restaurant, Peter Stevenson was at her side, bending down to whisper to her.
F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
2 2 7
“Come over and join us,” he said. “We can’t let you have dinner by yourself.”
Isabel looked up at him in gratitude. “I think the evening’s rather ruined for me,” she said.
“Surely there was no need for your friend to walk out like that,” said Peter.
“It’s my fault,” said Isabel. “I said something that I shouldn’t.
I touched the very rawest of nerves. I shouldn’t have done it.”
Peter placed a hand on her shoulder. “We all say things,”
he said. “Phone him tomorrow and patch up. It’ll look different then.”
“I don’t know,” said Isabel. She decided that some explanation was necessary. At the beginning of the evening she had rather relished the thought that people might imagine that she was with a younger lover; now she was not so sure whether that was what she would want people to believe.
“He and I are only friends,” she said to Peter. “I wouldn’t want you to think that there was anything more to it than that.”
Peter smiled. “How disappointing! Susie and I have just been admiring your choice in men.” He looked at her mischievously.
“We were also hoping that this might mean you were spending less time fussing about ethical issues, and more time enjoying yourself.”
“I don’t seem to be terribly good at enjoying myself,” said Isabel. “But thanks for the advice.” She hesitated; yes, he was right—she should enjoy herself. And for that, well, there was Tomasso. She could think about him, and their planned trip away together; that moment of—what was it?—irresponsibility?
No, she would look upon it as a moment of perfectly rational decision.
Peter nodded in the direction of his table. “Come along,” he 2 2 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h said. “Join us. That’s Hugh and Pippa Lockhart at our table.
They met playing together in the Really Terrible Orchestra with us. She’s less terrible at the trumpet than he is—in fact, she’s quite good. You’ll like them. Come on.”
She rose to her feet. The remains of the evening could be salvaged, a small scrap of dignity recovered. She had had misunderstandings with Jamie before, and she would apologise to him tomorrow. And then she reminded herself who she was.
She was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was not a love-struck girl abandoned by a petulant boyfriend. These were restorative thoughts, and her mood lifted. She had done her duty and given him the advice that she was morally obliged to give him, so she had nothing to reproach herself for there.
And, besides all this, she had the overwhelmingly good news that he would not be leaving Edinburgh. It was as if a weather warning had been lifted. There had been a mistake: winter was cancelled and we would move straight to spring.
So she crossed the restaurant to join Peter and Susie, oblivious to the furtive, pitying glances from those who had witnessed the sudden departure of Jamie. She held her head high; she had no need of pity. She might apologise to Jamie tomorrow, but she had no reason to apologise to these people. Edinburgh was a nosy town. People should mind their own business.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y
E
SHE LIKED THE ROAD out to West Linton, and always had.
It snaked round the side of the Pentland Hills, past old farm-steads and fields of grazing sheep, past steep hillsides of heather and scars of scree, past Nine Mile Burn and Carlops; and all the while, to the south-east, the misty Lammermuirs, blue and distant, crouched against the horizon. It was a drive that was too short for her, for the thoughts that she wanted to think on such a road, and she would gladly, if ridiculously, have doubled back and turned round and done it all over again so that she could prolong the pleasure. But she had a mission, a meeting with Jean Macleod, whom she had phoned and asked to see. She had said, I need to talk to you about your son, the son you lost, and the woman at the other end of the line had caught her breath and been silent for a moment before she said that Isabel could come and see her.
The village of West Linton clung to the side of a hill. The Edinburgh road followed a high contour, with the village itself hugging the hillside down to the low ground below. On either side of the Edinburgh road there were Victorian villas, houses with wide gardens and conservatories and names that one might 2 3 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h see in any small town in Scotland, names redolent of a douce Scotland of golf and romanticism. It was not Isabel’s world; she was urban, not small town, but she knew it to be the Scottish hinterland, ignored by the cities, condescended to by the urban-ites, but still there. It was a Scotland of quiet manners and reserved friendliness, a Scotland in which nothing much happened, where lives were lived unadventurously, and sometimes narrowly, to the grave. The lives of such people could be read in the local kirkyard, their loyalty and their persistence etched into granite: Thomas Anderson, Farmer of East Mains, Beloved Husband of fifty-two years of . . . and so on. These were people with a place, wed to the very ground in which they would eventually be placed. The urban dead were reduced to ashes, disposed of, leaving no markers, and then forgotten; memory here was longer and gave the illusion that we counted for more. It was a simple matter of identity, thought Isabel. If people do not know who we are, then naturally we are the less to them. Here, in this village, everybody would know who the other was, which made that crucial difference.
She branched off the main road and slowly wound her way down into the village. On either side of the narrow main street, small stone buildings rose—houses, shops, a pocket-sized hotel.
There was a bookshop run by somebody she knew, and she would call in there afterwards, but for now she had to find the Wester Dalgowan Cottage, to which Jean Macleod had given her careful directions.
It was just off the road that led towards Peebles and Moffat—a small house constructed from the grey stone of the valley, at the end of a short section of potholed, unpaved track. Behind it the open fields stretched away to the south; in front of it a small patch of untended garden, suffocated by thriving rhodo-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E