“Why do people have to work so hard?” she asked. “Do you think it’s natural to work ten hours a day, every day? Were we made to do that, do you think?”
Cynthia frowned. She looked rather displeased by this remark, as if Isabel had interrupted the flow of her thought with some specious question. “That’s how it is,” she said. “It’s China and India, isn’t it? They are prepared to work for next to nothing, which means that our people have to run to keep still.
Nobody can compete with the sweatshops.”
Isabel thought that was probably right. If we believed that 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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we could survive on our wits without actually making anything, then we were living in a fool’s paradise. But she was not sure that this applied to lawyers. So she simply said, “No.”
“No,” echoed Cynthia. “Anyway, Patrick does all this very cheerfully, I must say. And he’s doing very well, as I said.” She paused. “His career is very important to him, you know.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Isabel.
Cynthia reached out and picked a piece of fluff off a cushion and twisted it between her fingers. “I’m not sure that it’s a terribly good idea for him to get too emotionally involved with anybody at this stage,” she said quietly. “These next few years will be pretty important for him, job-wise. I imagine that he might be offered a partnership before too long. If he applies himself, that is.”
Isabel tried not to grin. The approach had come, and she marvelled at Cynthia’s effrontery. It amazed her that anybody would think this way, but it was even more astonishing that Cynthia felt that she could raise the issue like this. She was about to invite her, Isabel thought, to interfere.
“Emotional involvement is what people do,” said Isabel. “All of us.”
Cynthia drew in her breath. “I don’t think they’re suited,”
she said. “Sorry to have to say it. But I don’t.”
“It’s difficult to say,” said Isabel evenly. “Very different people, or people who strike others as being very different from each other, can get on very well. It’s chemistry, don’t you think?”
Cynthia’s eyes were upon her again. “I know my own son,”
she said. “I know what he’s like.”
“I’m sure you do. But when it comes to these things, to . . .
well, sex, it’s a very private matter, isn’t it? And can we ever tell 1 5 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h who’s going to get on well sexually with whom? I can’t. I’ve never been able to.”
Cynthia stiffened. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I don’t imagine that sex lies behind it.”
Isabel was silent. Patrick’s mother obviously did not know Cat. Isabel remembered telling Cat that she thought she sexu-alised the world too much. And Cat had laughed and said, “But, Isabel, the world is sexual. It is.”
Cynthia looked at her, but when Isabel said nothing, she continued, “I don’t know you well. But I’m sure that we both have the interests of Patrick and Kate—”
“Cat,” corrected Isabel.
“Cat. We both have their best interests at heart. A word from you, perhaps, to your niece might help her see that this is not necessarily the best thing for them. Do you think so?”
“No,” said Isabel. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
Cynthia suddenly got to her feet. “I’m sorry that I raised this,” she said. “I thought that we might see things in the same way. We obviously don’t.”
Isabel rose to stand beside her. “Don’t you think that we should keep out of it?” she said. “It’s their business, after all.”
She wanted to add, “And it’s time to let go of your son,” but she did not, because she felt that it would be cruel to say that, even if it was abundantly clear that that was what Cynthia needed to do.
Later that evening, as she walked back with Joe and Mimi and she described the conversation to them, Mimi said, “You were right not to say anything more. Poor woman. He’s all she has, and that’s rather sad, isn’t it? People cling. It’s not the best way, but you can understand why they cling.”
Isabel felt chastened. The needs of others were not a matT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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ter to be treated lightly, even when they were unreasonable, as was the case with Cynthia. I should feel sympathy for her, she thought, not irritation. And yet one could not hold on to somebody beyond a natural point, and Patrick, surely, had reached that point where his mother should let him go to live his own life. This made her think of Jamie, of course.
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
E
MIRANDA, the Australian whom she had met at the Stevenson party, telephoned at nine o’clock the following morning, reminding Isabel that she had offered to speak to Cat about a job. Isabel, immured in her morning room with her coffee and the Scotsman crossword, with Mimi seated opposite her reading The Times, was surprised that she should call so early and so soon after the offer was made. But she was not irritated, as one sometimes may be when a promise is called in. It was understandable that Miranda should call and remind her; finding a job was a major thing for her. Then there was her age—nineteen or twenty-one is impatient, or less patient, Isabel thought, than thirty or forty. Isabel agreed to speak to Cat that morning and to telephone her once she had found out whether Cat could offer her anything.
“I hope you don’t think I’m being pushy,” Miranda said.
“Calling straight away and all. But you did say . . .”
“I did,” said Isabel. “And I’ll do what I said I would do.”
Isabel thought that it would be easier to discuss this with Cat in person, so she went into Bruntsfield an hour or so later.
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Eddie was standing at the door of the delicatessen when she arrived. He turned to her distractedly and then spat out, “Somebody’s stolen coffee again.” Then he swore—a simple expletive, crude, dirty.
Isabel looked at Eddie. He was staring down the street, his lip quivering in anger, his face flushed, as if he had just come running from somewhere. There were times when he seemed on the brink of tears, from sheer injustice, Isabel had always thought, and from that ancient, unspecified hurt; now it was more immediate.
“Stolen coffee?”
Eddie turned to face her. “It happens all the time,” he said.
“They just go for it. It’s always packets of coffee. Nine times out of ten.”
Isabel looked down the street. It was that time in the morning when things were at their quietest: those going to work had caught their lumbering buses, and it was too early for the morning shoppers to come out. A man walked past with his dog, a small cairn terrier with a collar on which dog was written helpfully in studs; the man glanced at Isabel and then at Eddie and smiled. There was a woman with a heavy bag, and a couple of boys of fourteen or fifteen, loose-limbed, dressed in black jeans sinking to the ground and voluminous T-shirts, engaged in the tribal debate of teenagers. She saw no fleeing shoplifters.
She followed Eddie inside, and the air changed; the smell of coffee (a temptation perhaps to the thieves), of ripening cheeses; the dry, itchy notes of pulses and cereals. Isabel had always felt that this was the smell of real food—supermarkets smelled of chemicals and detergents and cellophane wrapping.
Eddie, normally laconic, was vocal. “I don’t know why they 1 6 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h go for it,” he said. “They stuff their pockets with that Kenyan blend with the nice picture on it. Then they run out of the shop.”