Isabel smiled at her. She felt better for having said, and thought, what she had just said. She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry: the load of being ourselves. “But of course,” she said, “I shouldn’t talk about meeting other men. There’s Patrick.”
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There was a slight cooling of the atmosphere. “I haven’t known him that long,” said Cat defensively. “He’s not necessarily the one.”
“Of course not,” said Isabel hurriedly. “I enjoyed meeting him, by the way.”
Cat looked away. “He enjoyed meeting you too.” Isabel was not sure if this was true or if it was just politeness on Cat’s part—or on Patrick’s part, for that matter. She doubted whether he would really have enjoyed meeting her; there had been no warmth in their encounter—although she told herself that she really had tried; they were just too dissimilar.
There was a silence. Over at the counter, Eddie finished serving a customer and stretched his arms above his head, yawning. He looked towards Isabel and lowered his arms sheepishly, as if caught doing something furtive. “Tired?” Isabel mouthed to him across the room, and he nodded.
“Patrick is fun,” said Cat suddenly, as if she had just thought of a reason why she should like him. “He makes me laugh. He’s witty.”
Isabel tried to conceal her surprise. She could not recall much of Patrick’s conversation, but it did not seem to her it had been witty. “That’s important in a man,” she said. “I can imagine nothing worse than being with a man who has no sense of humour. Just imagine it. It would like being in the desert.” She paused. “Have you met his mother yet? He lives at home, doesn’t he?”
“I’ve met her once or twice,” Cat replied. “She’s a local politician. She used to be in charge of—”
Isabel raised a hand. “Of course! I thought that Patrick’s name was familiar. Cynthia Vaughan. That’s his mother. I’ve met her too. Several times. We were on a committee together.”
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“That’s her,” said Cat. “They live in Murrayfield. Near St.
George’s School.”
Isabel placed her knife and fork on her empty plate. This was not particularly good news. Cynthia Vaughan was the last woman she would wish on Cat. She was a powerful, rather hec-toring woman, almost a parody of the pushy local politician. Any son of hers would have a battle escaping from a mother like that. That was why he still lived at home, thought Isabel. She won’t let him leave.
“She’s not a woman I would care to disagree with,” Isabel said cautiously.
The note of defensiveness came back into Cat’s voice. “She was perfectly nice to me.”
“I’m sure she was,” reassured Isabel. But she thought, with some relief perhaps, Patrick is not going to last. The choice is going to be between Cat and his mother. And the mother will win, because she was the sort who had never allowed herself to lose a political battle, and the fight between mothers wanting to hold on to their sons and the women who wanted to take their sons away was a battle royal, more dogged than the Battle of Bannockburn, more poignant than the clash at Culloden Moor.
C H A P T E R S E V E N
E
SHE CLIMBED THE STAIRS to Jamie’s flat in Saxe-Coburg Street. She occasionally called in unannounced, which he did not seem to mind, and he did the same to her; neither was offended if the other was busy and made that apparent. Jamie had to practise, and she had to edit. Both knew that these activities took precedence over social activities.
He had an old-fashioned bell pull, which he had restored to working order and of which he was inordinately proud. A small brass arm, complete with clenched hand and cuffs, that hung at the side of his door could be pulled downwards, causing a bell inside to sound briefly. A couple of tugs would produce a longer, more insistent peal. Isabel pulled the bell handle, glancing at the fanlight above the door. The glass in the fanlight, Jamie had said, was the original pane put in when the tenement was built in 1850. “You can tell old glass,” he said. “It is thicker at the bottom than at the top. It’s liquid, you see. It very slowly sags downwards.” Like people, thought Isabel.
Jamie answered the door and from his expression she knew immediately that he was not busy; this was not the I’m-in-the-8 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h middle-of-something face. He smiled at her and gestured for her to come in. “I was about to phone you,” he said.
Isabel took off the light raincoat she had been wearing—it was one of those days which could not decide between wet and dry—and hung it over the chair in the hallway. Jamie’s flat was not large: a small hallway gave onto a living room off which was a bedroom; these rooms, together with a generous-sized kitchen and a cramped bathroom, completed the accommoda-tion. Jamie taught bassoon in the living room, where there was an upright piano in one corner. Most of his teaching was done in schools, but the occasional private pupil came to the flat, especially boys from the Academy, which was more or less next door.
If the wind was in the right direction, as it was now, one might hear the school’s pipe band practising, the wailing of the pipes drifting across the rooftops. It could be worse, Jamie had said.
Imagine living in Ramsey Garden and having the Military Tat-too taking place in one’s backyard every night for a month. And Isabel had listened for a moment and said: “I have nothing against ‘Lochaber No More.’ That’s what they’re playing.”
“Something like that,” said Jamie. “I don’t notice it, really.
It’s just part of the background. Like the traffic.”
Isabel listened. There was no traffic sound, as far as she could tell, just the pipes. She glanced at Jamie. How strange it must be to be entirely beautiful—did one think about it?
Did one see the heads turn? He did not, she thought; he seemed blissfully unaware of what he looked like, and seemed not to care. He was just easy with it, which was part of his charm. There was nothing more unattractive than narcissism, she thought; nothing could transform beauty into a cloying, unattractive quality than that self-conscious appreciation of self. There was none of that in Jamie.
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“Mimi and I were talking about it. ‘Lochaber No More,’ ” said Isabel. “That McTaggart upstairs in my house made me think about it. And now . . .” She moved to the living-room window and looked out over the roofs towards the Academy. The pipes died away; the last notes had been reached. The air now seemed very still; what had been light rain was now mist, and there were signs of the sun trying to break through. “That’s the trouble with our weather,” she continued. “It doesn’t know what it’s doing.”
“I like it,” said Jamie. “It keeps us on our toes. I’m not sure that I would like the predictability of living in Sicily or somewhere like that. I’d miss our skies.”
“I suppose so,” said Isabel. “But then, every so often I have this yearning to go away altogether. To get away from Scotland and its weather. I could very easily live in the south of France, you know. In fact, I may go one of these days.”