Mimi nodded. “I can see the two of you. I can see it.” She touched Isabel on the arm, briefly, the gesture of an older 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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cousin. “Whatever time it happens in your life—whenever it is that your parents die—you miss them, don’t you? It’s the end of such a chapter. Two of the most important actors in the play are written out.”
“I miss her a lot,” said Isabel. “I can’t say that I think of her every day, but I think of her often. She comes into my mind, as if she’s still here. A presence.”
“As it should be,” said Mimi.
“We idealise them, don’t we?” Isabel went on, swapping her bags from hand to hand to redistribute the load. “I’ve sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to have a parent who did something really awful—what it would be like if one discovered that. I knew somebody who did, you know. The effect on her life was devastating. Everything changed for her. She was happy one moment and then the next . . .”
“What happened?”
“It was a girl I knew at university, at Cambridge. She was in my college; a rather sporty girl who played tennis, I think, and something else. She found out that her father had been seeing a prostitute. He was the chairman of a bank and this woman was blackmailing him.”
“That’s hardly unusual,” said Mimi. “And the fact that he was being blackmailed almost turns him into a victim, doesn’t it?”
They resumed their walk. “He would have been the victim of the story,” Isabel continued, “except, as they say, for one little thing. He tried to hire somebody to kill her. And he was discovered. The man he approached developed cold feet and went to the police. They wired him with a tape recorder and this gave them the evidence they needed. His trial was all over the papers, and this poor girl had to sit it out. Nobody spoke to her about it. In fact, somebody thoughtfully removed the newspa-9 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h pers from the common room on the day his conviction was reported. We all pretended it just hadn’t happened, whereas we should have talked to her about it. We should have given her some support.”
“Of course,” said Mimi. “But at that age one doesn’t want to face up to things like that. One thinks that cheerful denial is better. But I suppose it never is.”
Isabel wondered about that. She knew people who did very well on cheerful denial; rather better, she suspected, than if they faced up to the problem. Cheerful denial was certainly one way of dealing with an illness, and those who denied often fared better because optimism, and laughter, had a strong psycho-somatic effect. But this conversation was about parents. “I don’t know how I would have handled it if my parents had had affairs,” said Isabel. “Or tried to kill somebody. I think that it must be one of the most difficult things for children to handle—having affairs, that is. I know that people can’t help themselves—well, I count myself fortunate that I didn’t have that to deal with.”
Mimi was silent for a few moments. Then she said, quietly,
“No. It can’t be easy. It can’t be easy for anybody.”
They came to the top of Isabel’s street. In a garden on the corner, a large secluded square of land behind a high stone wall, the branches of a cluster of elms moved slowly in the breeze.
Behind them, the sky was clear, intersected by the vapour trail of an aircraft, heading west. Isabel pointed to the line of white, and Mimi looked up, through her large oval glasses. Isabel saw the sky reflected in the lenses, a shimmer of blue.
“One of the things I regret,” she said to Mimi as they looked up, “one of the things I regret most is never having known my sainted American mother as an adult. I suppose I would have 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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known more about her if I had. As it is, I don’t really know that much.”
Mimi let her gaze move earthwards. “Of course, that’s what you call her, isn’t it? Your sainted American mother. That’s very nice.”
“Would you be able to tell me about her?” Isabel asked suddenly. She looked at Mimi, her eyes filled with eagerness.
“Would you mind? Just tell me everything you know about her.
What sort of person she was—from the adult point of view. Was she happy? What moved her? Give me an idea of who she was.”
Mimi did not reply, and Isabel asked her again.
“Do you want the unvarnished truth?” Mimi asked.
Isabel’s expression was serious. The truth was a serious matter. “Of course I do,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell me anything but the truth, would you?”
“People sometimes don’t want to hear everything about their parents,” said Mimi. “Not everything.”
Isabel was vehement in her denial of this. She wanted to hear it all, she said. After all, it’s not as if there were any serious skeletons in the cupboard.
Mimi stopped and stared at Isabel. “But what if there were?”
Isabel’s answer came quickly. “I’d want to hear about them,”
she said. “Definitely.”
Mimi seemed unconvinced. “Are you sure?”
“Very sure. And the fact that you’ve mentioned this means that there is something.” She paused. “Tell me, Mimi. You have to tell me now.”
“I hadn’t planned to,” said Mimi, doubtfully. “It’s not . . .”
Isabel spoke gravely now. “Please. You’ve made me doubt—
not that I’m blaming you for that—but you have. You can’t stop 9 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now.” If Mimi left anything unsaid now, then it would prey on her mind. She might even wonder if her mother had tried to have somebody killed—ridiculous thought. The grocer, perhaps. Or one of her bridge four—for irresponsible bidding.
Mimi spoke evenly, in a matter-of-fact way, as a lawyer might do in addressing a court. “Your mother had an affair,” said Mimi. “She had an affair and never had the chance to confess to your father, or to make her peace with him. It was while she was having the affair that she discovered she was ill—that she was diagnosed with cancer. And by then she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. So he never found out. Or that’s what she told me. Which was better, don’t you think?” She had not understood why Hibby had had that affair. Sex? Is that all that affairs were about, or was it boredom, the sense of being trapped, the need for a form of companionship that a spouse cannot provide?
Their marriage had been a good one, Mimi had thought, and there had been no signs of an itch. But that, perhaps, was what itches were by nature: invisible.
They were halfway down the street. Isabel did not stop, but looked firmly at the pavement below her feet. The concrete was broken—the result of years of civic neglect, because this was a prosperous area and the authorities had other priorities. The well-off are never popular; they are tolerated, envied too, but not actually liked. She saw one or two places where weeds had taken hold in the cracks and had forced the surface upwards with the power of their roots. She listened to Mimi.
“And the man with whom she had this affair,” Mimi went on, “this man, who’s still around by the way—I saw him the other day, here in town—he dropped her; he dropped your mother when he heard that she was ill. That wasn’t his plan, you see. Your mother was very attractive, and it was fine to have an 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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affair with a beautiful, engaging woman, even if she was somebody else’s wife—that made it more exciting for him, I suppose.
But it was quite another thing to have an affair with a woman who was dying of breast cancer. The sick are not romantic, not really, in spite of Rodolfo and my namesake in their garret. It’s a different sort of love that puts up with illness. Old love.”