“And he is? He is really watching you?”
Isabel knew it sounded unlikely, but it was true. “Yes. It’s happened time and time again. I might be in my study, working, and I feel that there are eyes on me—eyes outside. And if I look up I see Brother Fox out in the garden, or see a flash of gold, which is him. He’s very beautiful, you see. Reddish-gold. A most beautiful creature.”
Isabel reached out and touched one of the flowers on the azalea bush. Nature was so beguiling in many of its corners; it was the tiny details that were important: the colour of these azaleas, somewhere between pink and red; the red-gold of fox fur. Why should we alone find the world beautiful? Or did 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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Brother Fox appreciate what he saw about him, and love it, as we did? No, we should not make the mistake of anthropomor-phism: the world for him was really not much more than a struggle for food, for life; a matter of genetic survival against all the competing genes; just struggle. And we were the enemy, with our dogs and our gas and our huntsmen with rifles; all terror and pain for foxes. But Brother Fox was not scared of her; he was wary, when he watched, but not scared.
The azalea was next to a mahonia bush, with its yellow flowers and those spiky leaves, so different from the azalea. Isabel’s hand moved on to touch the mahonia; it reminded her of holly, but it was more beautiful.
“I occasionally dream of Brother Fox,” she said to Mimi. “In my dreams he can speak. It’s very strange, but not at all odd in the dream, you know. He speaks with a slightly high-pitched, rather refined Scottish voice, but once he spoke French, and that surprised me. He used subjunctives and I remembered thinking how remarkable it was that an animal should have the subjunctive.” She used the construction “have the subjunctive”
without thinking that it might have sounded strange to Mimi.
Scots said “I have the Gaelic” when they could speak Gaelic.
Mimi laughed. “And what did he say in these dreams?
Small talk?”
Isabel searched her memory. Dreams are lodged in a very short-term part of the memory, but she had committed these to more permanent storage because they had been so unusual.
Her last conversation with Brother Fox had been something about how we control our lives and how contingency plays a part in what we are. She remembered saying to him that he was a fox—and he had agreed—and that the pattern of his life was determined by that brute fact of biology. But then he had said, 1 6 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h And so is yours, and she had felt indignant that a fox should call into question her free will. Their conversation had ended in an atmosphere of polite distance, which Isabel regretted, as she had had a sense of the preciousness of speaking with a fox.
She told Mimi this, and Mimi said, “But he was right, wasn’t he? Or you were, rather. Conversations in our dreams are really conversations with ourselves, aren’t they? Have you ever thought of it that way?”
“No, but you’re right. Internal rhetoric—that’s what philosophers would call it.” A mahonia leaf pricked the tip of her finger, just slightly, but she said to herself: I must be careful of sharp things. Internal rhetoric. “But . . . but surely, we don’t have to agree with what is said by the people to whom we are talking in our dreams? Of course we may put words into their mouths—we are after all the director of our dreams—”
“And producer,” interjected Mimi.
“Yes, and producer. But what is said in the dream by other people may just be what we think those other people are likely to say. The fact that we write the lines for them doesn’t mean that we agree with the sentiments behind the lines, does it?”
Mimi felt that she needed time to think about this. Philosophy, she had always thought, was often just a matter of common sense; a matter of finding the words to describe what is, or, in some cases, what should be. What Isabel had just said might have sounded complicated, but in reality it was not. The play-wright, the novelist did not endorse what their characters said—
that seemed clear enough. But where did it all come from?
Every word of Shakespeare was, after all, Shakespeare; if something came from the mind of the writer, then it was there in that mind, even if only as a possibility. And surely the insights of psy-chology underlined the point that what we talked about was 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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what we were interested in, and, sometimes, what we believe—
even if we said we didn’t! That was why we sometimes criticised others for doing exactly what we would want to do ourselves but did not dare—which meant that the writer might not be believed in protesting that the words on the page were nothing to do to with him. They could well be.
Mimi thought of somebody she knew who often spoke of a mutual friend’s tendency to consult the plastic surgeon. “Such a conservationist,” the critic said. “She deserves some sort of award.”
And Mimi had politely observed that perhaps she, the critic, would like to do the same thing, which had not gone down well, because, she thought, it was true. But it had stopped the remarks.
“Sometimes we say things which are the—” Mimi began, but Isabel, who had not heard her, had started to say something else.
“I know that the dreams of others are tedious,” she said.
“And I know I shouldn’t bore you with these things. But I had an extremely odd dream last night.”
“About Brother Fox?” asked Mimi.
“No,” said Isabel. “About Tom and Angie. Your friends.”
“You must have been thinking about them during the day,”
offered Mimi. “I find that what I dream about very much reflects what has been on my mind that day. It happens all the time.”
Isabel turned away from the mahonia and faced Mimi. “It was very odd,” she said. “Quite disconcerting, in fact.”
“One shouldn’t let dreams worry you,” said Mimi reassuringly. “Everybody does disconcerting things in dreams.”
“Oh, I behaved myself,” said Isabel. “I don’t think I had much to do or say in the dream. I was there, I suppose, because 1 7 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h I saw what happened. But I didn’t do anything. I was just standing there, a bit shocked, I think.”
Mimi raised an eyebrow. She waited for Isabel to continue.
“We were somewhere over in the west of Scotland,” Isabel went on. “I think that it was on the Mull of Kintyre, or somewhere like that. We were in a house near the sea, and there was a room with one of those extraordinary cases of little stuffed animals dressed up in outfits, riding tiny bicycles, playing croquet.
You know those strange things? The Victorians loved them.
They would gas kittens, send them off to the taxidermist, and then put them into a sort of tableau vivant, or tableau mort, I suppose. An orchestra of kittens, with minute instruments. A court scene with kitten jurors and kitten lawyers.”
Mimi made a face. She liked cats, and indeed had been the owner of a dynasty of distinguished cats, including Arthur Brown, an immense and dignified furry ball, who had been much admired by all in that part of Dallas, and who had died, suddenly, on the kitchen floor, of a heart attack, much as overworked busi-nessmen dropped on the golf course. “I don’t approve . . .”
“Neither do I,” Isabel supplied. “But there was one of those cases in the room, and then in came Tom and Angie. They looked at the case, and walked out of the room. Then Angie came back in alone and started to read the Scotsman on the sofa. She turned to me and said, ‘I’ve killed Tom, you know.’ And that was it.”