C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T H R E E
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GRACE PUT THE MAIL on Isabel’s desk.
“Not very many letters this morning,” she said. “Four, in fact.”
“What matters is the quality,” said Isabel, shuffling through the envelopes. “New York, Melbourne, London, and Edinburgh.”
“Edinburgh is the fish bill,” said Grace. “Smell the envelope. They write the bills out in that funny little office they have at the back of the shop. Their hands smell of fish when they do it. One can always tell the fish bill.”
Isabel raised the plain brown envelope to her nose. “I see what you mean,” she said. “Of course, people used to send perfumed letters. I had an aunt who put a very peculiar perfume on her letters. I loved that as a child. I am not sure whether I’d be so keen on it now.”
“I think that we come back to these things,” said Grace. “I loved rice pudding as a girl. Then I couldn’t touch it. Now I must say that I rather look forward to rice pudding.”
“Didn’t Lin Yutang say something about that?” mused Isabel. “Didn’t he ask: What is patriotism but the love of the good things that one ate in childhood?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace laughed. “Grub first, then ethics. That’s what I say.”
Isabel began to say, “Brecht . . . ,” but stopped herself in time. She picked up the envelope which bore the New York postmark. Slitting it open, she extracted a letter and unfolded it.
For a few minutes she was silent, absorbed in the letter. Grace watched her.
She was smiling. “This is a very important letter, Grace,” she said. “This is from Professor Edward Mendelson. He’s the literary executor of W. H. Auden. I wrote to him, and this is his reply.”
Grace was impressed. She had not read Auden, but had heard him quoted many times by her employer. “I’ll get round to reading him,” she had said, but they both doubted if she would.
Grace did not read poetry—Grace’s razor.
“I wrote to him with an idea,” said Isabel. “Auden wrote a poem in which he uses imagery which is very reminiscent of Burns. There are lines in ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ about loving somebody Till a’ the seas gang dry. You remember those, don’t you.”
“Of course,” said Grace. “I love that song. Kenneth McKel-lar sings it beautifully. He made me fall in love with him. But there must be so many people who fell in love with him. Just like they all fell in love with Plácido Domingo.”
“I don’t recall falling in love with Plácido Domingo,” said Isabel. “How careless of me!”
“But Auden? What’s he got to do with Burns?”
“He taught for a short time in Scotland,” said Isabel. “As a very young man. He taught in a boarding school over in Helens-burgh. And he must have taught the boys Burns. Every Scottish schoolchild learnt Burns in those days. And still should, for that matter. You learnt Burns, didn’t you? I did.”
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“I learnt ‘To a Mouse,’ ” said Grace. “And half of ‘Tam O’Shanter.’ ”
“And ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’?”
“Yes,” said Grace, and for a moment the two women looked at one another, and Isabel thought: This is one of the things that binds us together—in all the privilege of my life, in all that has been given to me through no effort of my own, I am bound to my fellow citizens in the common humanity that Burns spelled out for us. We are equal. Not one of us is more than the other.
We are equal—which was the way she wanted it; she would have no other compact. And that is why when, at the reopening of the Scottish Parliament after those hundreds of years of abeyance, a woman had stood up and sung “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” there had been few hearts in disagreement. It was the rock to which the country, the culture, was anchored; a consti-tution, a charter of rights, written in song.
“I wrote to Edward Mendelson,” Isabel went on, “because I thought I could detect Burns—the influence of Burns—in one of Auden’s lines. And now he’s written back to me.”
“And said?”
“And said that he believes it possible. He says that he has some correspondence in which Auden says something about Burns.”
Grace’s expression suggested that she was not impressed. “I must get on with my work,” she said. “I’ll leave you to your . . .”
“Work,” said Isabel, supplying the word that Grace might have uttered in quotation marks. She knew that Grace did not regard the hours she spent in her study as real work. And, of course, to those whose work was physical, sitting at a desk did not seem unduly strenuous.
Grace left her, and she continued with the rest of the corre-2 5 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h spondence and with a set of proofs that she had neglected over the last few days. She did not regret the time she had spent away from her desk, particularly the previous day’s trip to West Linton. As far as she was concerned, she had done her duty by Ian and had brought the whole matter to its resolution. On the journey back from West Linton Ian had been loquacious.
“You were right,” he said. “I needed to say thank you. That was probably all there was to it.”
“Good,” said Isabel, and she had mused on how strong the need to thank may be. “And do you think that will be the end of those . . . what shall we call them? Experiences?”
“I don’t know,” said Ian. “But I do feel different.”
“And we’ve laid to rest all that nonsense about cellular memory,” said Isabel. “Our faith in the rational can be reaf-firmed.”
“You’re sure that I met him, or had him pointed out to me, aren’t you?” Ian asked. He sounded doubtful.
“Isn’t that the most likely explanation?” replied Isabel. “It’s a small village. People would have known about the death. They would have talked. You probably heard it, even if indirectly, from your hosts—a chance remark over breakfast or whatever. But the mind takes such things in and files them away. So you knew—but didn’t know—that Euan was the man you wanted to thank. Doesn’t that sound credible to you?”
He looked out of the window at the dark fields flashing by.
“Maybe.”
“And there’s another thing,” said Isabel. “Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don’t they? Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong.
The same applies to our lives. It’s exactly the same.”
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Ian said nothing to this, but thought about it all the way back to Edinburgh, and continued to think about it for the remainder of that evening, in silence and in gratitude. He was not convinced by Isabel’s explanation. It could be true, but it did not seem true to him. But did that matter? Did it matter how one got to the place one wanted to be, provided that one got there in the end?
JA M I E WA S I N V I T E D for dinner that evening and accepted. He should bring something to sing, Isabel said, and she would accompany him. He could choose.
He arrived at seven o’clock, fresh from a rehearsal at the Queen’s Hall and full of complaint about the unreasonable behaviour of a particular conductor. She gave him a glass of wine and led him through to the music room. In the kitchen, a fish stew sat on the stove, and fresh French bread was on the table. There was a candle, unlit, and starched Dutch napkins in a Delft design.
She sat down at the piano and took the music which he handed to her. Schubert and Schumann. It was safe, rather gemütlich, and she felt that his heart was not in it.