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He replied, ‘Sometimes I seem to see a difficulty—but then again I don’t see it.’ ” Isabel was not sure whether this was funny. She thought it might be, but stories told by philosophers which appeared to be funny were sometimes not funny at all, but very serious. And sometimes very serious remarks made by philosophers were, in fact, jokes, and intended to be taken as such.
Jamie had arrived at the café first that morning, and she found him already seated at the table near the window, paging through a musical score. He rose to greet her—Jamie always stood for women—and he reached out to shake her hand. They did not exchange a kiss of greeting; they had never done this, although it had become the social norm in some circles in Edinburgh. Friends, even friends of a single meeting’s standing, kissed one another when they met; or at least men and women did. Isabel was unhappy about this rash of kissing. A kiss, she thought, was an intimate gesture, which was not enjoyable in any way when you did not know the person very well. Indeed it could be embarrassing: spectacles could get in the way and lipstick be left on male cheeks. There were other arguments against it: the recent consumption of garlic had a tendency to make an impression, and it was, she assumed, a good way of passing on a cold.
She would have enjoyed kissing Jamie, though—even through a miasma of garlic. He is so beautiful, she thought. He is at the moment of his greatest beauty, round about now. He will never be so beautiful again.
“You look thoughtful,” said Jamie as they sat down together.
Isabel blushed. She could hardly say to him: I was thinking of what it would be like to kiss you. We often cannot tell people just what is going on in our minds, she thought, and so we hide 3 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h things. And that was inevitable—to a degree—although there was a danger, surely, that if one concealed too much it would show. One would become furtive.
“I was thinking, I suppose,” she said lightly. “I find I think too much. You yourself have accused me of that, haven’t you?”
He had. He had told her on several occasions that she complicated matters and that the world was simpler than she imagined. But she had paid no attention, or, if she had heeded his advice, she had been unable to change her ways.
Jamie smiled. “Yes. I’ve told you plenty of times. Don’t make things difficult for yourself. And do you do anything about it?
You don’t.”
Isabel knew that he was right about her. But what he said raised the broader issue of whether anybody ever listened to advice. She suspected that few did.
“And do you listen to my advice?” she retorted.
Jamie looked puzzled. “What advice have you ever given me?”
Isabel was already asking herself this even as he posed the question. The only advice she had given him had to do with Cat.
She had told him to give up any thought of getting Cat back because there was just no prospect of it ever happening.
She looked at Jamie, and he knew immediately what she was going to say. He looked down at the table in his embarrassment. “I know,” he said. She waited for him to say something more, but he was silent.
She felt sorry for him. People made bad choices when it came to other people; and some people never recovered from the mistakes they made. Everybody knew just how sad it was to have a hopeless love, but still people, including herself, fell for the unattainable. There is no point in my loving this young man, she told herself, because it can never go anywhere. And yet 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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it matter if love was not reciprocated? Was it not possible to love somebody hopelessly, from a distance even, and for that love to be satisfying, even if never reciprocated, even if the object of one’s affections never even knew? Jamie could love Cat even if he never, or only rarely, saw her. And she could love Jamie even if he never knew that she did. Both of us give love, she thought, and that must do something for us. Perhaps it was a bit like giving an anonymous gift. If one derived pleasure from the giving of something even if the recipient never knows who gave it—
and it was a pleasure to give anonymously, as Isabel knew—then could not the giving of love be satisfying even if the person one loved never knew that he or she was loved? People did that all the time when they loved the inaccessible: the great romantic heroes, the film stars, the rock musicians, who were loved by legions of people who never saw them. Or the saints, and, if one came to think about it, God—although he, if one believed in him, loved one back, and so that was different; that was reciprocated love.
“Does it matter?” she asked Jamie. “Does it matter if one loves somebody who doesn’t love one back? Do you think that it makes a difference?”
He looked up at her. “Of course it does. It’s sad.”
“Sad?” she mused.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s like . . .”
She raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”
“Like talking to somebody who isn’t listening,” Jamie said.
“Yes, that’s what it’s like.”
Isabel thought about that for a moment. “Is it because one can’t share the feeling of love? Is it like having dinner all by oneself?”
It was then that Jamie had asked her about why she was 4 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h buying Grace the flat, and the conversation had drifted off unsatisfactorily into theories of moral obligation. After a few minutes of that, Jamie signalled to the waitress. “We’re going to have to hurry,” he said to Isabel, tapping his watch. “Isn’t this person expecting you in the flat in ten minutes?”
Isabel replied that she was. So they placed their order for coffee and moved off the subject of morality, which was intrac-table, to house prices, which was a depressing subject. Both of them owned their houses; Jamie by virtue of the generosity of an elderly relative eager to avoid inheritance tax, and Isabel because her father had left it to her: old money, or at least money in late adolescence. Neither had earned the place in which they lived; many of those who earned what they had could hardly afford to live in Edinburgh now, with its high prices, just as people in London and New York found salaries inadequate for the cost of buying a roof to go over one’s head. There was something wrong with this, Isabel thought, but it seemed to be an inescapable aspect of economic life: those who came in latest had the most uncomfortable chair, or no chair at all.
T H E R E WA S N O T I M E for further conversation. They gulped their coffee down and then walked round the corner into St.
Stephen Street.
“Here we are,” said Isabel, pointing to a door at the top of a short flight of external stone steps. “That’s the number.”
Outside the door, mounted on a shabby brass plaque, were the names of the residents. Isabel found the name she was looking for, Macreadie, and rang the bell.
“Just walk right up,” issued a woman’s voice from a small intercom. “Top floor.”
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The mutual stairway was shabby and smelled of cat. And there, on the second-floor landing, was the possible culprit, a large tom in ginger, with ears tattered by conflict and a wall eye.
“A pugilist,” said Isabel, pointing to the cat.
“Somebody loves him,” said Jamie. “But let’s not go into that again.”
They reached the top landing and found that the door had already been opened for them. Standing in the doorway was a woman of about sixty, her hair swept back in the way used by Grace, wearing an intricately knitted Shetland sweater. Isabel noticed the pattern immediately. Somebody had sat for hours over that, working in all the natural colours, putting the sky and sea of those beautiful bare islands into the design.