insensitive thing to you. I thought that it was my fault.” She reached forward and took the plate away from the place in front of him. Then she scraped off the salad, and gave it back to him. “Just an omelette.
As nature intended. Nothing else.”
“That’s perfect,” he said. “I’m sorry about that. It’s genetic, I T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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think. My mother had exactly the same problem, and a cousin of hers too. We’re allergic to raw onion.”
“And I thought for a moment that it had something to do with Cat . . . and with the time you cooked dinner for the two of us in Saxe-Coburg Street.”
Jamie, who had been smiling, now looked pensive. “I remember,” he said.
Isabel had not intended to mention Cat, but now she had, and she knew what the next question would be. He always asked it, whenever she saw him.
“What is Cat up to?” he asked. “What is she doing?”
Isabel reached for her glass and poured herself some wine.
She had not intended to drink anything more after her sherry with Neil, but there in the intimacy of the kitchen, with the yeasty smell of mushrooms assailing her nostrils, she decided otherwise;
“Cat,” she said, “is doing what she always does. She’s quite busy in the shop. She’s getting on with life.” She trailed off weakly. It was such a trite reply, but what more was there to say?
To ask such a question, anyway, was the equivalent of asking
“How are you?” on meeting a friend. One expects only one answer, an anodyne assurance that all is well, later qualified, perhaps, by some remark about the real situation, if the real situation is quite different. Stoicism first, and then the truth, might be the way in which this could be expressed.
“And that man she’s seeing,” said Jamie quietly. “Toby. What about him? Does she bring him round here?”
“The other day,” said Isabel. “I saw him the other day. But not here.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie reached for his glass. He was frowning, as if struggling to find precisely the right words. “Where, then?”
“In town,” Isabel replied quickly. She hoped that this would be the end of this line of questioning, but it was not.
“Was he . . . was he with Cat? With her?”
“No,” said Isabel. “He was by himself.” She thought: That is, he was by himself to begin with.
Jamie stared at her. “What was he doing?”
Isabel smiled. “You seem very interested in him,” she said.
“And he’s not really very interesting at all, I’m afraid.” She hoped that this aside would reassure him as to whose side she was on, and that the conversation might move on. But it had the opposite effect. Jamie appeared to interpret it as paving the way for further discussion.
“What was he doing, then?”
“He was walking along the street. That’s all. Walking along the street . . . in those crushed-strawberry corduroys that he likes to wear.” The last part of her answer was unnecessary; it was sarcastic, and Isabel immediately regretted it. That was two unpleasant things she had said tonight, she thought. The first was that gratuitous remark about men not cooking; the second was an unworthy remark about Toby’s trousers. It was easy, terribly easy, to become with time a middle-aged spinster with a sharp tongue.
She would have to guard against this. So she added, “They’re not too bad, crushed-strawberry corduroys. Presumably Cat likes them. She must . . .”
Again she stopped herself. She had been about to say that Cat must have found crushed-strawberry corduroys attractive, but that would have been tactless. It implied, did it not, that Jamie, and his trousers did not measure up. She allowed herself a furtive glance at Jamie’s trousers. She had never noticed them T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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before, largely because her interest in Jamie lay not in his trousers, but in his face, and his voice. In fact, it lay in the whole person; and that, surely, was the difference between Toby and Jamie. You could not like Toby as a person (unless you yourself were the wrong sort of person); you could only like him for his physique. Yes, she thought, that’s all. Toby was a sex object in crushed-strawberry corduroys, that’s all he was. And Jamie, by contrast, was . . . well, Jamie was just beautiful, with those high cheekbones of his and his skin and his voice which must surely melt the heart. And she wondered, too, what they were like as lovers. Toby would be all vigour while Jamie would be quiet, and gentle, and caressing, like a woman really. Which might be a problem, perhaps, but not one that she could realistically do very much about. For a few moments, a few completely impermissible moments, she thought:
Such thoughts were as unacceptable as imagining people being crushed by avalanches. Avalanches. The roar. The sudden confusion of crushed strawberry. The tidal wave of snow, and then the preternatural quiet.
“Did you speak to him?” asked Jamie.
Isabel returned from her thoughts. “Speak to whom?”
“To . . . Toby.” It clearly involved some effort for him to bring himself to pronounce the name.
