He let go of her hand and returned to his meal.
“Can we go away together?” he asked. “Somewhere on the west coast? Or one of the islands?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’d like to go to Harris,” he said. “Have you ever been to the Outer Hebrides?”
“Yes,” she answered. “And there’s a hotel I know there, just a small one, a converted manse. It looks down on a field that is full of wild flowers in the spring and summer, with the sea just beyond. Cold, green waves. The very edge of Scotland. It’s very beautiful. We could go there. Would you like that?”
“Very much.”
She smiled at him, and put her hand to his cheek, as she had done before, on that first discovery. But as she did so, she thought: I am going to break my heart over this, but not now, not just yet.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O
E
HAPPINESS. Over the next few days, Isabel felt herself to be in state of blessedness. She spoke to Jamie every day, and saw him briefly, for a snatched lunch in the small café opposite the gate of the Academy; he had an hour between pupils and they talked, low-voiced because a couple of the boys from the school were sitting at a nearby table, sniggering. Isabel eventually smiled at them and they blushed scarlet and turned away.
Isabel’s happiness, though, was qualified by her anxiety over Cat. There had been rows with Cat before, and they always resolved themselves after a few days. The normal pattern would be for Isabel to apologise, whether or not she was in the wrong, and for Cat, grudgingly, to accept the apology. Isabel thought that she might wait a little longer before she went to speak to her niece; that would give Cat time to simmer down and also, she hoped, to begin to feel guilty about her own behaviour. This time it really was not her fault, she thought. Cat had no right to Jamie, having rejected him and turned a deaf ear to his attempts to persuade her to take him back, and even if Isabel had perhaps been insensitive to the need to talk to her about her feelings for Jamie, she considered this to be a light offence.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She made her way to the delicatessen in the late morning.
She had written a note which she would leave for Cat—a note in which she confessed her lack of sensitivity and asked Cat to forgive her. I’ve been thoughtless, she wrote. But then, in self-defence, It may be hard for you—I understand that—but please let me be happy. I had not imagined that this would happen.
Please give me your blessing. She had read and reread the note, agonising over the wording, but had eventually decided that the words were just right because they were true.
Cat was not there. Miranda and Eddie were behind the counter, Eddie cleaning the slicer—Isabel’s blood ran cold even at that—and Miranda serving a customer. Both of them glanced at her; Miranda smiled and Eddie acknowledged her with a slight nod.
“Cat?” she asked Eddie.
“Out,” he said. And then added, “Patrick.”
Isabel sighed. Even if Patrick was as busy as his mother suggested, he still seemed to have a lot of time for lunch with Cat.
She wondered whether his mother knew about these trysts, and whether, if she did, she would try to interfere.
She asked Eddie to pour her a cup of coffee. Then she picked up a newspaper and went to sit at one of the tables. The world was in chaos, the front page suggested: floods had destroyed a large part of somebody’s coast, and there were pictures of a couple stranded up a tree, the woman wailing, her skirts torn and muddied; there were people building nuclear weapons; a large lake somewhere had been found to be poisoned, dead. So we frighten ourselves daily, thought Isabel, and with reason.
She folded the newspaper up and put it away. She would look out at the street, watching passers-by, and then, if Cat had not returned in twenty minutes, leave the note. She stared 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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through the window, past the carefully arranged display of bottles of olive oil which Eddie had set up to lure customers inside.
Eddie was in charge of the window displays, and looked forward to the beginning of each week, when he would rearrange them.
He brought Isabel her coffee and sat down opposite her, his cleaning cloth draped casually over his shoulder. “I heard your news,” he said, grinning as he spoke. “Congratulations.”
Isabel sipped at the scalding, milky coffee. She had not anticipated this; Cat must have told him. “She told you? Cat did?”
Eddie nodded. “She wasn’t pleased. Or at least not at first.
She said that I’d never believe what you’d got up to. Then she told me, expecting me to side with her.”
Isabel watched Eddie as he spoke. He would never have been this forthcoming a few months ago. And when he had first come to work for Cat he would hardly have said more than a word of greeting, and mumbled at that. This was progress.
“And you didn’t?” she asked.
“Of course not,” said Eddie. “I laughed. She didn’t like that.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Isabel. “She virtually accused me of stealing him.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Eddie. “And I told her she had no right to be jealous.”
Isabel told him that that was exactly what she had thought.
But one was dealing with irrational feelings here, she pointed out. Jealousy was something which people found difficult to control; sometimes it was impossible.
“I know,” said Eddie. “Anyway, I talked to her about it and she calmed down. Then, at the end, she said that maybe she should be proud. She said that . . .” He trailed off, and Isabel looked at him quizzically.
“Go on,” she encouraged him. “She said what?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Eddie looked sheepish. “She said that not everyone had an aunt who was capable of running off with a younger man. She said that it showed a certain style.”
“And that was how you left it?”
He nodded. “Yes. Then we started talking about Miranda.
We—”
Isabel glanced across the room and cut Eddie off. Miranda had finished dealing with the customer and was coming over to join them at the table. “Here she is. Here’s Miranda.”
Miranda came up to stand behind Eddie. She greeted Isabel, smiling warmly, and then she rested a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie half turned, smiled and lifted a hand to place on hers, patting it fondly. Isabel watched in astonishment.
“Yes,” said Eddie.
“Well,” said Isabel. “Well . . .”
“You should have told me, Isabel,” said Miranda in mock admonition. “You should have told me that the nicest boy in Scotland worked here. As it is, I had to discover that myself.”
Eddie beamed with pleasure. “We must get back to work.”
He rose to his feet and touched Miranda gently on the shoulder.
“Come on.”
Isabel watched them return to the counter. For each of us, she thought, there is our completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding, is a matter of moral luck. She had a good idea of what it was that had happened to Eddie, but now she saw that shattered, timid life begin to be made confident and whole, and she felt a warm rush of satisfaction and pleasure. She reached into her pocket and took out the note she had written to Cat. It was in its rectangular white envelope, the flap tucked in. She took it out and reread it. It had 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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taken time to choose and weigh each word; now she tore it up in seconds and tossed the pieces into the bin used for scraps of sugar wrappers and the like. The next move was Cat’s rather than hers, and she would wait for it with impatience. She did not have to apologise for Jamie; she did not have to apologise to anybody for her happiness.