M I M I A N D J O E were out when she returned to the house, but Grace told her that they had said that they would be back in the late afternoon. There had been a change in their plans, and they had decided to go off the following day to Skye for a week. Joe wanted to write up his article on adoption and there were distractions in Edinburgh. “If I go somewhere really remote, I shall get it done,” he said. And Mimi had agreed. Skye, she said, was far enough away and, more important, there were few, if any, bookshops to distract him. For her part, she had reading to do, and could do it as well on a small island as on a big one.
Isabel would miss them, but would see them briefly on their return. And they had persuaded her to make a trip to Dallas to stay with them, which she had agreed to do before too long. “My sainted American mother would have liked me to . . . ,” she had said, and faltered. No. There was no reason why her mother should not still be called sainted. A saint might still fall in love; indeed, would it not be most likely that those who loved their fellow man in general might feel all the more strongly inclined to love their fellow man in particular? I love Jamie, she thought, and has that not made me love the world all the more? Of course it had.
That evening Mimi sat in the kitchen while Isabel did the 2 5 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cooking. They talked about Skye, and what Joe and Mimi might do there. They could stay in Claire Macdonald’s hotel; they could walk; they could watch the slow movement of the sea; they could sniff at the peat smoke in the air.
“Come with us,” urged Mimi. “There’s room.”
“I’d love to,” said Isabel. “But I have my work.”
“Be irresponsible for once,” said Mimi.
Isabel smiled at the thought. I’m being very irresponsible as it is, she thought, and it’s immense fun. “I can’t, I’m afraid,” she said. “The journal . . .”
Mimi conceded. “Of course. But if you change your mind, jump in the car and join us.”
Isabel, standing at the cutting board, neatly sliced an onion into rings. She felt tears come into her eyes and wiped them away with the back of her hand. “Not real tears,” she said to Mimi. “Nor even crocodile ones. Just onion tears.”
“A nice name for tears that don’t mean anything,” said Mimi.
“Yes. We’ll need to think about that.”
She looked out the window. To the west, the sky had clouded over to the west and was heavy and dark. “Rain,” said Isabel. “I hope that you’re not washed out on Skye. It has a tendency to rain over there, as you know.” She remembered a couple of lines which Michael Longley had written about such landscapes: I think of Tra-na-Rossan, Inisheer / Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain. It was such a powerful image of the rain that came in off the Atlantic, relentless, horizontal across the island.
“I’m not put off by rain,” said Mimi. “Rain can be beautiful, don’t you think? And there’s no point becoming depressed by it. That never changes anything.”
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“That’s fine if you’re from Texas,” said Isabel. “Rain doesn’t outstay its welcome down there.”
“Perhaps,” said Mimi. “But still . . .” She played with a button on her sleeve. “We had lunch in town today,” she said. “An interesting encounter.”
“With?”
“Angie, no less. She’s moved into town and is going back home tomorrow. Just her. The engagement with Tom is over, it seems. Very dramatic news. I’ve been itching to tell you. Joe, though, has been a bit embarrassed about it. He feels that it’s indecent to crow too much, even in a case like this. I told him I wasn’t crowing.”
Isabel moved the chopped onion to the side of the board, neatly, making a small white pile. So Tom had acted. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. And she was, in a sense; it was a tale of unhappiness from start to finish—an unhappy, false beginning and now an unhappy ending.
“Yes, it’s a bit sad really,” agreed Mimi. “I felt rather sorry for her at the end.”
Isabel looked up in surprise. “For Angie?”
“Yes,” said Mimi. “She said that she felt she had to do something about it. She didn’t want to hurt Tom, she said, but she felt that it just wasn’t working.”
Isabel stared at Mimi wide-eyed. “She said that she was the one who ended it?”
“Yes. I must say that I was a bit taken aback. I’d thought of her, as you know, as a gold-digger. But a gold-digger doesn’t end an arrangement like that. A real gold-digger would have hung on in. She didn’t.”
Of course she wouldn’t, thought Isabel. She would have 2 5 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h received her pay-off. There would be no reason to hold on after that.
“Then she said something really surprising,” Mimi went on.
“She said that Tom had offered her money to end the engagement. She said that she had been quite shocked and had turned him down.”
“Turned him down?”
“Yes.”
No, thought Isabel, highly unlikely. “Did you believe her?”
“Yes, I did,” said Mimi. “She seemed completely sincere.”
Both were silent for a while. In Isabel’s case, it was a silence of indecision. If Angie was telling the truth, then Isabel had completely misjudged her. But had she been telling the truth?
Mimi, though, seemed to be in no doubt. “I’ve learned a bit of a lesson,” she said. “Or rather, I’ve been reminded of something that I suppose I knew all along—that you just can’t be certain about people and their motives. You can’t. You think you know, then . . .”
Mimi could be right, thought Isabel. And then reminded herself that she had encouraged Tom to end the engagement on the basis of her own, possibly misguided, feelings about Angie’s venality. But did that make any difference to the outcome? If Angie had ended it of her own accord, then the fact that she had urged Tom to tackle her about it was quite irrelevant. It occurred to her, though, that if Angie was not telling the truth and the break-up had really been at Tom’s insistence, then her own encouragement of Tom may have played a part in the end result.
She looked helplessly at Mimi, wondering whether she should tell her cousin about what she had done. Mimi, though, had guessed that there was something on Isabel’s mind. “You’re 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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feeling bad too?” she asked gently. “You shouldn’t worry about it, you know. Angie probably misjudged you too.”
“Maybe. Maybe she did. But she wouldn’t have thought of me in quite the terms I thought of her. I doubt if she thought I was up to committing murder.”
Mimi looked at Isabel in astonishment. “And you thought that of her? That she was capable of murdering Tom?”
Isabel confessed that she had, and told Mimi of the conversation in which Tom had described Angie’s reaction to the near-disaster at the Falls of Clyde. Mimi listened thoughtfully, and then, when Isabel had finished, looked up into the air, as if searching for the solution to a conundrum. “Very curious,” she said at last. “Because, believe it or not, she said something rather similar to me. She said that she felt unsafe in Tom’s presence, as if there was something in him, something not always apparent, something buried deep within him, and this thing, this hidden thing, was a propensity to violence. She said she feared that he might use it against her.”