A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h places were laid before each: white napkins, glasses, silver. Near the large, sunken rockery, a table had been set up for the bar; next to it was a large tin bath in which stood a big lump of ice, like an ice sculpture awaiting its sculptor, with bottles nestling round its base.
Isabel liked this house. She liked the air of quietness, the feeling of being away from the fray, which, she thought, is exactly what a house should provide. She liked the feeling, too, that things were planned here; that what happened in this house happened because it was meant to. And this party, she thought, which had been decided upon only two or three days before, looked as if it were the result of weeks of preparation.
Joe and Mimi were introduced to Peter and Susie and taken off to meet somebody. Isabel, a glass of wine in her hand, walked out onto the lawn, nodding to one or two friends in the clusters of guests. It was a clear, warm evening, in spite of Isabel’s foreboding that the Scottish weather would misbehave; perhaps this was global warming, the creeping of Mediterranean conditions northwards, the migration of species into northern zones; hammerhead sharks in the Irish Sea—that was a thought—scorpions in the villages of England. But we had been warned, she reminded herself, that global warming would bring Scotland only more rain and less sun.
She looked heavenwards, and felt dizzied, as she always did when she looked up into an empty sky; the eye looked for something, some finite point to alight upon, and saw nothing. It might make one dizzy, she told herself, but it might make one humble too. Our human pretensions, our sense that we were what mattered: all of this was put in its proper place by simply looking up at the sky and realizing how very tiny and insignificant we were. Our biggest cities, our most elaborate sympho-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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nies, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the smartest gadgets, were nothing really, just a momentary arrangement of the tiny number of atoms we had in our minuscule patch of space. Nothing.
“A monkey puzzle tree.”
Isabel turned round. Mimi, a glass of what looked like champagne in her hand, had come up behind her.
“Yes,” said Isabel, glancing at the tree at the far end of the garden. “They used to be very popular. The Victorians loved them and put them everywhere.”
“You’re so lucky with your soil,” said Mimi. “You have this lovely rich soil. My garden in Dallas is clay. And it gets so dry.”
It sounded to Isabel as if Mimi were reproaching herself.
“You can’t help your soil,” Isabel said. “Nor your weather.”
Mimi looked at a clump of rhododendrons in flower along one of the garden walls, the blossoms pink and red against the dark green of the leaves. “Our soil is our fault—to an extent.
Remember the dust bowl. Dust storms and tumbleweed? That was human greed. And we repeat that sort of mistake, don’t we?
Look at Las Vegas, if you can bear to. That’s in the desert, we should remind ourselves. We’ve built that dreadful disaster in the desert, of all places.”
“I suppose somebody likes Las Vegas,” said Isabel.
Mimi was silent. There was a bird somewhere in the undergrowth, hopping about, making the leaves rustle.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” Mimi said suddenly. “I’m not sure if I should have told you what I told you. About your mother.”
Isabel continued to stare at the point where the bird had been. “I’m glad that you did. And I asked you to. If you had refused I would have felt that you were hiding something from me. And we have to know these things . . .”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“Do we?” asked Mimi.
“Once we suspect them.”
Mimi was unconvinced. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m not sure that we want our parents to be human. We know that they are, of course, but it’s a special sort of knowledge—or I think it is. Like the knowledge that we’re not here on this earth for ever.
We know that, but we don’t think of it all the time, do we? We put it to the back of our minds.”
Isabel took a sip of her wine. Champagne had been on offer, but she had missed it for some reason. “Well, if we don’t want to know too much about our parents—or about their faults, rather—then maybe that’s because we see ourselves in what they did. We recognise their failings because they are our own failings too. Unacknowledged, perhaps.”
Mimi nodded. “That may be.”
Isabel decided that she would go on. She could talk to Mimi because she was family, but a friend too, and she had always felt that Mimi understood. But how could she put it? And would Mimi be shocked? She had to remind herself that there was nothing shocking about it. Not objectively, but talking to another person about what one felt at that most intimate level was an incursion into the private, whatever people said, however frank the climate of the day.
She turned and looked at Mimi, and saw herself again, for a moment, in the lenses of those oval glasses, as in a mirror. “I was surprised to hear that my mother had had an affair, but . . .
but that’s not all that unusual and people do. However, it was the fact that it was with a younger man, a far younger man.
That . . .”
Mimi smiled. “Shows good taste? A certain spirit?”
“That’s exactly what I’m on the verge of doing.” She had said 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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it, and it sounded ridiculous. To be on the verge of having an affair! Either one had an affair or one did not.
Isabel looked for signs of surprise in Mimi, but there were none. Mimi just looked at her, as if expecting her to say something else. “But I knew that,” she said. “Jamie. I assumed that.”
Now the surprise was Isabel’s. “I didn’t realise . . .”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Mimi, reaching out for Isabel’s forearm. “We never realise how transparent we are. But people know. It was obvious at that dinner party you gave.”
“You gave.”
“I gave,” acknowledged Mimi. “You can tell when somebody is in love with another person. There’s a conspiratorial look.
No, that’s not quite right. There’s a connivance. No, that’s not correct either. There’s something. Put it that way. There’s something.”
“And you saw that there was something?”
Mimi patted her gently on the arm. “I did.” She paused, looking directly at Isabel. Now, thought Isabel, now come the words of warning, of caution. Do you think that it’s . . . I don’t want to interfere, but . . . Instead, Mimi said, “Who wouldn’t? Or rather, who couldn’t?”
“I’m sorry?”
Mimi spoke clearly. “Who couldn’t be in love with him?
Certainly, if I were your age, which I’m not, and if I were single, which I’m not, I’d have no hesitation in falling for somebody like that.”
It was the third such reaction. Florence Macreadie had said much the same thing, and then Grace. Now it was Mimi’s turn.
Nobody, it seemed, saw a problem. Or did the problem exist only in her imagination?
Isabel was about to speak. She suddenly felt she wanted to 1 4 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tell Mimi about how she had agonised over her feelings for Jamie, and how it now seemed that it had all been unnecessary.
But before she could say anything Mimi said, “A young man like that, of course, turns heads. He’ll have people falling for him left, right and centre. Angie certainly did that evening. Did you see it?”