“Sir . . . ,” began Robin, then faltered. Isabel saw his expression, the slight air of being taken aback and the quick recovery.
And she thought: This is what this man must experience every time he meets somebody; the shock as the distorted face is registered and then follows the attempt to cover the reaction. She remembered how she had once had lunch with a young man, the nephew of a friend of hers, who had come to seek her advice about studying philosophy at university. She had met him for the first time in a restaurant. He had come in, a self-possessed, good-looking young man, and when they had moved to the table she had seen the scar which ran down the side of his cheek. He had said immediately: “I was bitten by a dog when I was a boy.
I was thirteen.” He had said that because he had known what she was thinking—how did it happen? Presumably everybody thought that and he supplied the answer right at the beginning, just to get it out of the way.
The man fingered his tie nervously. “I didn’t want to interrupt,” he said. Then, turning to Isabel, he repeated, “I’m sorry. I didn’t wish to interrupt.”
“We were just blethering,” said Robin, using the Scots word.
“Don’t worry.”
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He’s American, thought Isabel, from somewhere in the South. But it was difficult to tell these days because people moved about so much and accents had changed. And she thought of her late mother, suddenly, inconsequentially, her sainted American mother as she called her, who had spoken in the accent of the American South, and whose voice had faded in her memory, though it was still there, just.
She looked at the man and then quickly turned away. She was curious about him, of course, but if she held him in her gaze he would think that she was staring at his face. She moved away slightly, to indicate that he should talk to Robin.
“Isabel,” said Robin. “Would you mind?”
“Of course not,” said Isabel. “Of course not.”
She left Robin talking to the man while she went off to examine more paintings. She noticed that the woman had also come out of the smaller gallery and was now standing in front of an Elizabeth Blackadder oil of the Customs Building in Venice.
“Elizabeth Blackadder. She’s a very popular artist,” said Isabel casually. “Or at least on this side of the Atlantic. I’m not sure whether people know about her on your side.”
The woman was surprised. She turned to face Isabel. “Oh?”
she said. “Black what?”
“Blackadder,” said Isabel. “She lives here in Edinburgh.”
The woman looked back at the painting. “I like it,” she said.
“You know where you are with a painting like that.”
“Venice,” said Isabel. “That’s where you are.”
The woman was silent for a moment. She had been bending to look more closely at the painting; now she straightened up.
“How did you know that I was American?” she asked. Her tone was even, but it seemed to Isabel that there was an edge to her voice.
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“I was over there when your . . . your husband spoke,” she said quickly. “I assumed.”
“And assumed correctly,” said the woman. There was no warmth in her voice.
“You see,” continued Isabel, “I’m half-American myself.
Half-American, half-Scottish, although I’ve hardly ever spent any time in the States. My mother was from—”
“Will you excuse me?” said the woman suddenly. “My friend was asking about a painting. I’m interested to hear the answer.”
Isabel watched her as she walked across the gallery. Not married, she thought. Friend. It had been abrupt, but it had been said with a smile. Although Isabel felt rebuffed, she told herself that one does not have to continue a conversation with a stranger. A minimum level of politeness is required, a response to a casual remark, but beyond that one can disengage. She was interested in this couple, as to who they were and what they were doing in Edinburgh, but she thought: I mean nothing to them. And why should I?
She went to look at another painting—three boys in a boat on a loch somewhere, absorbed in the mastery of the oars, the youngest looking up at the sky at something he had seen there.
The artist had caught the expression of wonderment on the young boy’s face and the look of concentration on the faces of his companions; that was how artists responded to the world—
they gaze and then re-create it in paint. Artists were allowed to do that—to look, to gaze at others and try to find out what it was that they were feeling—but we, who were not artists, were not.
If one looked too hard that would be considered voyeurism, or nosiness, which is what Cat, her niece, had accused her of more than once. Jamie—the boyfriend rejected by Cat but kept on by 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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Isabel as a friend—had done the same, although more tactfully.
He had said that she needed to draw a line in the world with me written on one side and you on the other. Me would be her business; you would be the business of others, and an invitation would be required to cross the line.
She had said to Jamie: “Not a good idea, Jamie. What if people on the other side of the line are in trouble?”
“That’s different,” he said. “You help them.”
“By stretching a hand across this line of yours?”
“Of course. Helping people is different.”
She had said: “But then we have to know what they need, don’t we? We have to be aware of others. If we went about concerned with only our own little world, how would we know when there was trouble brewing on the other side of the line?”
Jamie had shrugged. He had only just thought of the line and he did not think that he would be able to defend it against Isabel in Socratic mood. So he said, “What do you think of Arvo Pärt, Isabel? Have I ever asked you that?”
A F T E R S H E H A D F I N I S H E D her business in town, Isabel decided to walk back to the house. It was by then afternoon, and the sunshine of early June, now with a bit of warmth in it, had brought people out onto the streets in their shirtsleeves and blouses, optimistic, but resigned to being driven back in by rain, or mist, or other features of the Scottish summer. Her walk back, like any walk through this city, was to her an exercise in association. One would have to have one’s eyes closed in Edinburgh not to be assailed by reminders of the past, she thought—
the public or personal past. She paused at the corner of the 1 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h High Street where the statue of Edinburgh’s most famous philosopher, David Hume, had been placed. What a disaster, she thought. Isabel admired Hume and agreed with Adam Smith’s view that he approached as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will per-mit. But the good David was a natty dresser, interested in fine clothes (there was Allan Ramsey’s portrait to prove that), and here he was, seated in a chair, wearing a toga, of all things. And there were some who had voiced further objections. Hume was a reader, they said, and yet here he was merely holding a book, not reading it. But what, she wondered, would the statue have looked like if he had been portrayed in elegant clothes with his nose stuck in a volume of Locke? There would have been objections to that too, no doubt. This was the public past, about which we often disagree.
She walked back across the Meadows, a wide expanse of common ground on which people strolled and played. To the south, along the edge of the park, rose the high Victorian tene-ments of Marchmont, stone buildings of six floors or so, topped with spiky adornments—thistles, fleurs-de-lis and the like.