“Haydn,” whispered the woman, transformed. And the man nodded.
Isabel suppressed a smile. The world, she supposed, was full of enthusiasts and fans of one kind or another. There were people who loved all sorts of extraordinary things and lived for their passions. Haydn was a perfectly respectable passion, as were trains, she supposed. W. H. Auden, or WHA as she called him, had appreciated steam engines, and had confessed that when he was a boy he had loved a steam engine which he thought “every bit as beautiful” as a person to whom his poem was addressed. You are my steam engine, one might say, in much the same way as the French addressed their lovers as mon petit chou, my little cabbage. How strange was human passion in its expression.
The quartet tuned up and then began their Haydn, which they played with distinction and which in due course prompted rapturous applause from Isabel’s row. This was followed by the Bach, which took them up to the interval. Isabel often remained in her seat during intervals, but it was a warm evening and thirst drove her into the bar, where she joined a line of people waiting for drinks. Fortunately the service was efficient and she did not have to wait long. Nursing her white wine F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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spritzer, she made her way to one of the small tables under the mezzanine.
She looked at the milling crowd. A few people greeted her from the other side of the room—with nods of the head and smiles. Where was Jamie? she wondered. He would be playing immediately after the interval and might be in the green room, preparing his bassoon reed. She would see him after the concert, she imagined, and they might enjoy a drink together, discussing the performance.
Then she saw him, standing in a knot of people in the corner of the bar. One of them she recognised as another member of the chamber orchestra, a young man called Brian, who came from Aberdeen and who played the viola. And then, immediately next to Jamie, a tall girl, with blond hair and wearing a strappy red dress, who was holding a drink in her left hand and talking, and who now turned and leant up against Jamie. Isabel watched. She saw Jamie smile at the girl and place a hand on her shoulder, lightly, and then his hand moved up and brushed the hair from her forehead, and she returned his smile and slipped her free arm round his waist.
Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air.
She put down her glass and stared at the table for a few moments before she raised her eyes again and looked in their direction.
Jamie was looking at his watch and saying something to the viola player, and to the girl too, and then he unwound himself from her clasp and moved off towards the green-room door and the girl looked at one of the paintings on the wall—amateurish, characterless landscapes that the Queen’s Hall was trying in vain to sell.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel stood up. Making her way back to the hall she had to walk past the girl, but she did not look at her. Back in her seat she sat down heavily, as if dazed, and stared at the programme.
She saw Jamie’s name and the name of the viola player, and her heart was beating hard within her.
She watched as the players assembled, and then the Academy Chorus, young singers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, the boys in white shirts and dark trousers and the girls in their white blouses and navy blue pleated skirts. Then the conductor came on, and she watched him rather than look directly at Jamie, who seemed to be looking for her now, to smile discreetly at her in the audience as he often did.
They began with Howells, which Isabel hardly heard. Who was this girl? There was no girlfriend—not since Cat—and she had simply assumed that there would not be one. He had always made it clear that he wanted Cat back, and would wait for as long as it took. And she, Isabel, had gone along with this, and all the time what was happening was that she was becoming increasingly possessive of Jamie without ever having to acknowledge it. Now there was another woman, a girl really, and there was an obvious intimacy between them which would exclude her, as it would have to do, and that would be the end of everything.
When the Howells finished, she stole a glance at Jamie, but looked away again quickly because she fancied that he was looking at another part of the hall, where perhaps the girl was sitting. The chorus moved on to a Taverner motet, grave and echoing, and then to a John Ireland anthem, “Many Waters Cannot Quench Love.” Isabel listened now. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. No they cannot; they cannot. Love is as strong as death; it is stronger; it is stronger.
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At the end of the concert, she stood up as soon as the applause had abated. Normally she would have left by the back door, through the bar, where she would have seen Jamie coming out of the green room, but not this evening. She was one of the first out, into the busy night street where there were people about with business other than concerts. Then she walked briskly towards the Meadows, following the path beside the traffic, walking quickly, as if in a rush to get home; though nothing awaited her at home but the solace of the familiar.
The night sky was still light, a glow to the west, and it was warm. Many waters cannot quench love: the anthem’s setting remained in her ears, repeating itself; a tune so powerful that it might gird one against the disappointments of life, rather than make one aware that our attempts to subdue the pain of unre-quited love—of impossible love, of love that we are best to put away and not to think about—tended not to work, and only made the wounds of love more painful.
She stopped at the crossing light and waited for the signal to walk. A young woman, of student age, was at her side, waiting too. She looked at Isabel, hesitated for a moment, and then reached out to touch her gently on the arm.
“Are you all right?” she asked. She had seen the tears.
Isabel nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
C H A P T E R T H R E E
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OF COURSE it was much better in the clear light of day.
When she went downstairs the following morning, Isabel might not have forgotten about her momentary weakness, but at least she was back in control of herself. She knew that what she had experienced the previous evening was a sudden rush of emotion—the emotion in question being jealousy, no less. Emotional states of this sort came on quickly and were difficult to manage when first experienced, but the whole point about being a rational actor was that one could assert control. She, Isabel Dalhousie, was quite capable of holding negative emotions in check and sending them back to where they belonged.
Now, where was that? In the dark reaches of the Freudian id?
She smiled at the thought. How well-named was the id—
a rough, un-house-trained, shadowy thing, wanting to do all those anarchic deeds that the ego and super-ego frowned upon.
Much Freudian theory was scientifically shaky, even if it was such a literary treat to read, but Isabel had always thought that of all the Freudian conceits the id was probably the most credible. The bundle of urges and wants that went with being a physical being: the need for food, the need to reproduce—those F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E