“Yes,” Mimi continued. “Everybody has time for Tom. We don’t see a great deal of him, but now and then we do. He’s quite a shy man, really. His confidence was pretty dented by his condition. Do you know about Bell’s palsy?”
They were sitting together in the drawing room at the time.
Isabel had given Mimi a glass of New Zealand white wine, and she was holding her own glass, half full. She put it down on the table beside her. In her mind she saw the man in the gallery. She saw the face wrenched up at one side in that disfiguring grimace. That was Tom. That was who he was.
“I knew I was going to see him again,” she muttered. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” asked Mimi, taking a sip of her wine.
“I think I’ve met them,” said Isabel. “Just pure coincidence.
I saw them in a gallery. They were buying a painting, I think.”
“That’s them,” said Mimi. “She’s on a spending spree, I gather. Paintings. Rugs. Even a racehorse, somebody said.”
“But I had the impression that he was the one who was—”
“He’ll do anything to please her,” said Mimi. “Poor Tom.”
I S A B E L M E T CAT for lunch that day, at two o’clock—a late lunch, but that was when the busy time in the delicatessen T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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came to an end and Cat could leave Eddie at the counter while she took a break with Isabel at one of the tables. She had made Isabel a special Greek salad, which is what she knew she liked: salty cheese crumbled over olives and sliced boiled egg. Cat herself liked tomatoes and mozzarella.
“I haven’t thanked you for the other night,” said Cat. “We both enjoyed it. I love seeing Mimi and Joe, although they always make me feel a bit stick-in-the-mud. All the travelling they do.”
“I don’t know,” said Isabel. “You went to Italy not all that long ago. And you had those six months in Australia.”
Cat looked wistful. She had spent six months in Australia after university, working in a series of casual jobs, travelling and seeing the country. It had been the most perfect time of her life, and she could not think of it without a feeling of nostalgia. “Yes.
There was that. But that was then. Now is different. Now is here. And tomorrow will be here.”
Isabel speared an olive with her fork. “Not necessarily,” she said. “All sorts of things can happen. You might . . .”
Cat looked at her. “Yes? I might what?”
Isabel had been thinking of marriage. That was the obvious thing that could change Cat’s life and get her out of her rut, if that’s what she thought she was in. Marriage had changed Isabel’s own life—for the worse, but not every marriage did that.
One would have to be massively cynical to see marriage in that light. Were most marriages happy? Somewhere she had read that with increased participation by women in economic life—
as more women began to have their own careers—so the levels of happiness in marriage went down. Women in Sweden and countries like that, where women were free and independent, were apparently less happy in their marriages than women in 7 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h those countries where they had less power and participated less in the working world. Well, if that were the case, she thought, then that meant that there was something wrong with conventional marriage, rather than something wrong with freedom.
She could not tell Cat that she had been thinking of marriage, because she was not at all sure whether Cat wanted to get married. So many people no longer bothered, but just lived together, or left it for years and years before doing anything about formalities. But was that what Cat really wanted? Or did she want somebody to come along and make a public commitment to her, as people used to do with marriage, as she had done with John Liamor?
“I might what?” repeated Cat.
“You might meet somebody,” said Isabel.
Cat looked down at her plate, and Isabel knew that they were in awkward territory. She had learned her lesson, and was determined not to repeat the mistake she had made over Cat’s involvement with Toby. But there was no reason for Cat to take offence over a very ordinary reference to the possibility of meeting somebody, and so Isabel said, “You could find yourself in a relationship with somebody who worked somewhere else, for example. That happens, you know. What if you met an Australian you liked and you thought you might go off together to Melbourne or Perth or somewhere? That happens, a lot. And the other way round too. Somebody from Australia meets somebody from London and goes to live there.”
It did. There were love stories happening all the time in circumstances just like that; stories unsung, but as heroic and moving in their way as those that had been sung; we could not all be Tristan and Isolde, even if we were separated from one another by oceans and circumstance, but the whole point about T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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the great myths was that they were about exactly the things that we all experienced and recognised.
“You could meet somebody too,” said Cat. “An Australian philosopher. How about that? And then you’d be living in Melbourne.”
“I’d like that,” said Isabel.
“Melbourne? Or meeting somebody?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, I did go to Melbourne once, you know. And I found it fascinating. I’d be very happy there, I think. I love the Australian landscape. I like Australians.”
But that was not what Cat had wanted to find out. She had hardly ever discussed John Liamor with Isabel—there had been an unspoken understanding about that—and she knew that there was concealed pain there. But Isabel was a vivacious, attractive woman, and men liked her. There was no reason why she should not have a lover; or none that Cat could see.
“But what about meeting somebody?” asked Cat. “Australian or otherwise. There are plenty of men in Scotland, you know. Have you thought . . .”
Isabel had another olive to attend to. She thought: She doesn’t know, Cat doesn’t know that I have met somebody and that it’s Jamie. Yes, she had met him, but that was not what Cat meant. Cat’s question was about the meeting of somebody who would actually be suitable for her, who would be about her age, in his early forties, maybe a bit older. That’s what her question meant.
And for a few moments, Isabel was confused. She was confused because she knew that this was something that she had not confronted. She had been so scarred by what had happened with John Liamor that she had decided that she would be best off by herself. And then what had happened was that she had 7 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h found that of course she needed a man, and she had found herself falling for Jamie because he was there and he was so attractive and sympathetic and nobody could help but fall for him.
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved. WHA again had seen that when he had written about his love, as a boy, for a pumping engine. I . . . thought it every bit as beautiful as you. Of course it was. Love required an object, he said. That was all.
“I’d like to meet somebody,” she said. “Yes. I would. Yes.”
She looked up from her Greek salad, from the small, blissful world of olives and sliced boiled egg, and met Cat’s gaze.
Now Cat did not know what to say. What she thought was: Good, she’s over that awful Irishman. Good. But she did not know what to say because she had said that there were plenty of men in Scotland, but the fact of the matter was that there were not. There was a shortage of eligible men because of . . . what?
Demographic reasons: the death of men; all those men who died from working too hard and living at the wrong pace, whose final seconds must be filled with such regrets for all they had given to their work? The social acceptance of the gay alternative? She could not think of anybody suitable for Isabel, not one man, not one. He would have to be intelligent and urbane; he would have to have a sense of humour. She knew nobody over thirty-five who fitted those requirements who was not already married or with somebody or gay.