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there have been pogroms and oppression? Would you want to be reminded of that? I’m not sure I would.”
Tom used the end of his stick to prise an encrustation of mud off his boots. “Maybe. But don’t you think that it’s breaking faith with the people who had to put up with all that—to ignore, to forget about them now? And anyway, there’s nothing like that in being from here. Our Scottish ancestors weren’t miserable.”
Isabel looked at him with incredulity. Texans, she thought, were at least realistic; did Tom not know what it was actually like? Having read as much as he seemed to have done about Scottish history, he surely could not believe that. She watched him scrape the rest of the mud off his boots and then wipe the stick clean on a clump of heather beside the path.
“I don’t know how to put this,” she said, “but those distinguished Scottish ancestors you’ve unearthed—they weren’t exactly angels, you know. They can’t have been; not if they were at all prominent. All the leading Scottish families were just a bunch of rogues. They plotted and raided and disposed of one another with utter abandon—utter abandon. The Sicilians could teach them nothing. Nothing.”
Tom stared at her, and for a moment Isabel regretted what she had said. We have to believe in something, and a belief in the goodness of the place from which one had sprung, or one’s ancestors had sprung, was one of the ways of arming oneself against the cold knowledge that it would all be over in a moment and was nothing anyway. Meaning—that’s what we need, and if it helps to be Irish or Scottish or Jewish, or anything, for that matter, then we should let people believe in these scraps of identity.
“Of course one shouldn’t make too much of it,” said Isabel.
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“Not everybody was ruthless. There were saints too—lots of them. It’s just that it’s difficult to find many figures in Scottish history who didn’t have blood on their hands. You mentioned Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart.”
“She was wronged,” said Tom quickly. “And she didn’t kill her husband.”
“Darnley? No, there’s no evidence that she blew him up.
But since you mention him, let’s not forget that he was himself a murderer. He was in on the plot to kill Mary’s Italian secretary, wasn’t he? And when his friends came into the room he grabbed Mary and pinioned her while they dragged Rizzio away from her.
He did. That’s on the record. Which makes him a murderer.”
It was not one of Edinburgh’s most successful dinner parties, she thought. Mary Stuart had invited her guests to a room off her bedroom in the Palace of Holyrood. The guest list was smalclass="underline" her illegitimate brother, Lord Robert Stewart, and his wife; the Laird of Creich; Sir Arthur Erskine; and, at the other end of the table, David Rizzio. Rizzio was dressed in a gown of fur-trimmed damask, a doublet of satin, and velvet hose.
He wore a cap, too, by permission of the Queen, which was resented by those who had to remove their headgear in the presence of the monarch (everybody else, except Darnley, who was married to Mary). The loutish Scottish lords came into the room and seized Rizzio, who burst into Italian, and then French, in his desperation. Giustizia! Giustizia! Madame, sauve ma vie! She could not; she was just the half-French queen of a nation of boisterous men. They stabbed him again and again, again and again.
Tom pointed to the top of the hill, which still looked far away. Now they would have to leave the path, a glorified sheep track, as it followed the contour of the hill and they needed to 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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climb. They set out, making their way slowly over low heather. A female grouse broke cover suddenly, cackling in alarm, running along the ground, head lowered, to avoid what she thought would be her murderers. Isabel looked at her in pity, and felt a sudden tenderness, brought on by love. Love paints the world, she thought, enables us to see its beauty, its vulnerability, its preciousness. If we are filled with love, we cannot hate, or destroy; there is no room for such things. She closed her eyes for a moment, a dizzying moment, and she was back in that room, with Jamie beside her and the half-light of the summer sky outside, and her heart full of that very love she felt now.
“Are you all right?” Tom had stopped and was looking at her with concern. “Tell me if this is too steep.”
She reassured him that she was fine, that she had only been thinking of something and had closed her eyes because of that.
“I’m perfectly all right with this. I walk a lot in town, you know.
I’m fit enough.”
“Not everyone can climb a hill,” said Tom. “We’re so used to our cars. Our legs . . . well, we’re forgetting how to use them. Or that’s the way it is in Dallas. I try to walk as much as I can. I have a place out near Tyler. A nice bit of land. I’ve never managed to get the house as I want it. It’s in the wrong place, but my hands are tied. I’d like to knock it down and build again, but it was left to me and my sister jointly. Her husband won’t let her agree.”
“And Angie? Does she do much walking?” asked Isabel.
Angie had not been mentioned, and this was a chance to bring her into the conversation.
“She mostly drives,” said Tom. “But she plays tennis from time to time. She’d like to do more of that when we’re married.”
“I see,” said Isabel. She looked up at the sky; the rain was 2 1 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h holding off, but was there in the distance, in the heavy purple clouds over East Lothian and the sea beyond. “Have you known her for long?” The question was innocent, even banal; casual conversation on a walk between two friends who wanted to get to know each other better.
“A year,” said Tom, appearing to think. Sometimes we inflate times to make things seem better for us. “Or not quite.”
“You must have a lot in common,” said Isabel.
Tom did not answer immediately. Then he said, “Some things.”
Isabel made light of this. “Well, that’s a start. You’ll develop fresh interests together, no doubt. That’s so important in marriage. Without interests in common, well, I’m not sure what the point is.” That was as far as she could go, too far perhaps. Tom just nodded. He did not say anything.
When they reached the top of the hill, the view was as Tom had said it would be. There were blue Border hills in the distance and there, in the other direction, were the Pentland Hills, with Edinburgh just beyond, Arthur’s Seat a tiny, crouching lion. They sat down to get their breath back and Isabel laid back, looking up into the empty sky. The world is in constant flux, said the Buddhists, and she thought of this as she looked into the blue void; she imagined she could see the particles in the air, the rushing, swimming movement, the passage of the winds. Nothing was empty; it only appeared to be so. And then she thought: I am in a state of bliss. I am in love. Again. Finally.
JA M I E BO U G H T Isabel a jar of honey. It had been his only purchase in Peebles; a jar of honey which he placed in her hands with a smile. “Made by bees,” he said.
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Angie was watching as he did this. Her face was impassive.
She had found an antique dealer and bought a small, marble-topped French table, which Jamie had uncomplainingly carried to the car—it had been heavy—and one of those Victorian bottles filled with coloured sand to make a striped effect.
“What’s the point of that?” Jamie had asked.
“None,” replied Angie. “It’s a bottle with sand in it.”