“An expensive woman.”
“Yes,” he said. “You could say that. But he’s pretty well off, isn’t he? So that doesn’t matter.”
“And do you think she loves him?” asked Isabel.
Jamie looked out the window. They were now approaching the edge of town and the slopes of the Pentland Hills could be seen rising before them. Behind them, over the North Sea, there were clouds in the sky, and slanting squalls of rain; behind the Pentlands, though, the sky was light, glowing, as if with promise.
He fiddled with a button on his jacket. It was hanging on by a thread, and he had meant to sew it before he came, but ran 1 8 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out of time. “I haven’t given it any thought,” he said quietly.
“And I don’t think you should either.”
Isabel was quick to deny her interest. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to interfere.”
“Are you sure?” Jamie sounded dubious. He had witnessed Isabel’s interventions on more than one occasion, and if they had turned out well—or at least if they had not resulted in disaster—that was, he thought, owing in part to chance.
“All right,” she said. “I confess that I’m intrigued. And who wouldn’t be? A conspicuously wealthy, sophisticated man has a young fiancée with not a great deal of grey matter—well, one thinks about that.”
“It’s his business if he wants to take up with somebody like her,” said Jamie. “That’s what some men want.” He paused and looked at Isabel. “They’ll probably be blissfully happy.”
Isabel conceded that. They could be happy, with each getting from the relationship what each wanted. But what, she asked, if he were to find out that she was interested only in his money? Could he be happy in those circumstances?
“He might be,” said Jamie. “Presumably men like that have a pretty clear idea of what’s what. He might be able to see through her and still say to himself: Well, I don’t care if she doesn’t really love me, I’ve got an attractive young wife, and as long as she behaves herself . . .”
“Which she might not do,” said Isabel quickly. “What if she has an eye for other men?”
Jamie shrugged. “She’d be a fool.”
Isabel drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She wondered whether Jamie was one of those people who just could not understand the tides of passion; who thought that people calculated advantage and disadvantage in matters of the T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
1 8 1
heart—they did not; people behaved drunkenly, irrationally when it came to these things. Perhaps that was why Mary, Queen of Scots, married Darnley, against all her obvious interest? But she did not want to go into that. Already their discussion had developed an edge which was not right for a romantic trip into the country—if that was what this was going to be.
Suddenly she was aware of Jamie beside her, of his legs at an angle, of his right arm resting in a position where it almost touched her side, of the wind from the half-open side window in his hair, ruffling it; and the phrase your ordinary human beauty came into her mind, and it seemed to her to be so apt. Beauty that was so ordinary because it required no ornament, no false enhancement; that was ordinary human beauty and it was superior to any other beauty.
He said, suddenly, “Look at those sheep.”
She looked. They were heading now up the hill from Auchendinny, and on the right side of the road there were fields and woods falling away to a river. The sheep were clustered about a hopper into which a farmer was siphoning feed of some sort. Little drifts of powdered feed, dust from the sheep’s table, were being blown away by the wind.
“Their lunch,” she said. They both laughed; there was nothing funny about it, but it seemed to them that something significant had been shared. When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing, because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened? she wondered.
She remembered something. “You know, I came out here quite a few years ago, when the Soviet Union was still in business. Just. It was shortly before its end. There was a woman who was a philosopher who had been sent over here by the Academy 1 8 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of Sciences of the USSR, and I was asked to entertain her for a few days. Mostly she wanted to go shopping, because they had so little in their own shops and she needed things. But I brought her out here to Peebles, to have lunch, and she saw sheep in the fields and cried out, ‘Look at all those sheeps! Look at all those sheeps!’ Sheeps. That’s what she said, understandably enough.
And then she said, ‘Do you know, in my country, we have forgotten how to keep animals.’ ”
Jamie was quiet. “And she hadn’t seen . . .”
“She hadn’t seen anything like it,” said Isabel. “Apparently the Soviet countryside was pretty empty. Nobody on the collective farms kept animals. The bond between people and the land, between people and animals, had been broken.”
Isabel remembered something else. “And here’s another thing she said. We had a meeting at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It was an open seminar on political philosophy, and this woman and the two male colleagues who had come with her came to it. They spoke in Russian, and there was a translator.”
She paused as she remembered the translator, a sallow-faced man who had been a chain-smoker and who had slipped out of the room every fifteen minutes to have a cigarette. “Members of the public were invited, but hardly anybody came. There was one man who did, however, a rather thin, very elegant-looking man who must have been in his late seventies, I think. At the end, after our guests had finished, he asked a question. He spoke in Russian, and I saw them turn and stare at him in what seemed to be astonishment. And when I looked to her, this woman philosopher, I saw there were tears in her eyes. I asked her what he had said, and she just shook her head and replied,
‘It’s not what he said. That’s nothing. It’s just that I haven’t heard my language being spoken so beautifully, ever. Ever.’ It tranT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
1 8 3
spired that he was speaking pre-revolutionary Russian, that he was the son of an exile who had been brought up speaking old Russian in France. Our visitors were used to the brutality of Soviet Russian, which was full of crudity and ugliness and jar-gon, and that is what made her cry. To hear real Russian spoken again.”
TO M H A D F O U N D Tarwhinn House through a friend from Austin who had leased it a few years previously. The house had been in the same family for almost three hundred years, or so the owners claimed. It had been built in the seventeenth century by a man of some account in that part of Scotland, and it had remained with his successors until an unwise choice in the 1745 uprising—support for Bonnie Prince Charlie—had resulted in the then head of the family being outlawed, pursued to the very jetty from which he set ignominious sail for France, and his property taken away from him. That was the point at which the new owners acquired it by bribery, insinuating themselves into the position of the disgraced owner and eventually assuming his arms and his name. “An early example of identity theft,” remarked Isabel, when she heard the story.
The current generation felt no need to gloss over the facts of the shameful acquisition and wholeheartedly adopted the romantic associations of the property. But they had other fish to fry, and the house and estate had been neglected. Eventually repairs could be put off no longer—the roof, in particular, was suffering from something which roofers call nail sickness, in which the nail holes through the slates grow larger, the nails weaken, and the slates begin to slip. The owners called in builders and decorators, and the air of damp and fustiness which had 1 8 4