“Oh,” said Isabel. “Kirsty.”
“She met an Italian last year when she was teaching English in Catania. Salvatore. They fell for one another and that was it.”
For a moment Isabel was silent. She had fallen for John Liamor in Cambridge all those years ago, and that had been it too. She had gone so far as to marry him and had tolerated his unfaithfulness until it had been too much to bear. But all these Kirstys were so sensible; they would not make a bad choice.
“What does he do?” Isabel asked. She half expected Cat not to know; it always surprised her that her niece seemed uninterested in, or unaware of, what people did. For Isabel, it was fundamentally important information if one were even to begin to understand somebody.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat smiled. “Kirsty doesn’t really know,” she said. “I know that’ll surprise you, but she says that whenever she’s asked Salvatore he’s become evasive. He says that he’s some sort of busi-nessman who works for his father. But she can’t find out exactly what this business is.”
Isabel stared at Cat. It was clear to her—immediately clear—what Salvatore’s father did.
“And she doesn’t care?” Isabel ventured. “She’s still prepared to marry him?”
“Why not?” said Cat. “Just because you don’t know what happens in somebody’s office doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t marry them.”
“But what if this . . . this office is headquarters of a protection racket? What then?”
Cat laughed. “A protection racket? Don’t be ridiculous.
There’s nothing to suggest that it’s a protection racket.”
Isabel thought that any accusations of ridiculousness were being made in exactly the wrong direction.
“Cat,” she said quietly. “It’s Italy. In the south of Italy if you won’t disclose what you do, then it means one thing. Organised crime. That’s just the way it is. And the most common form of organised crime is the protection racket.”
Cat stared at her aunt. “Nonsense,” she said. “You have an overheated imagination.”
“And Kirsty’s is distinctly underheated,” retorted Isabel. “I simply can’t imagine marrying somebody who would hide that sort of thing from me. I couldn’t marry a gangster.”
“Salvatore’s not a gangster,” said Cat. “He’s nice. I met him several times and I liked him.”
Isabel looked at the floor. The fact that Cat could say this merely emphasised her inability to tell good men from bad. This F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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Kirsty was in for a rude awakening, with her handsome young mafioso husband. He would want a compliant, unquestioning wife, who would look the other way when it came to his dealings with his cronies. A Scotswoman was unlikely to understand this; she would expect equality and consideration, which this Salvatore would not give her once they were married. It was a disaster in the making, and Isabel thought that Cat simply could not see it, as she had been unable to see through Toby, her previous boyfriend; he of the Lladro porcelain looks and the tendency to wear crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers. Perhaps Cat would come back from Italy with an Italian of her own.
Now that would be interesting.
C H A P T E R T W O
E
WHEN IT CAME TO a Queen’s Hall concert, Isabel Dalhousie had a strategy. The hall had been a church, and the upstairs gallery, which ran round three sides of the hall, was designed to be uncomfortable. The Church of Scotland had always believed that one should sit up straight, especially when the minister was in full flow, and this principle had been embodied in its Scottish ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, the upstairs seats prevented any leaning back, and indeed were inimical to too much spreading out in any direction. For this reason, Isabel would attend concerts in the Queen’s Hall only if she could arrange a ticket for downstairs, where ordinary seats, rather than pews, were set out in the main body of the kirk, and only in the first few rows which afforded a reasonable view of the stage.
Her friend Jamie had arranged the ticket for her that evening, and he knew all about her requirements.
“Third row from the front,” he assured her on the telephone. “On the aisle. Perfect.”
“And who’ll be sitting next to me?” Isabel asked. “Perfection implies an agreeable neighbour.”
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Jamie laughed. “Somebody wonderful,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what I asked for.”
“Last time I was in the Queen’s Hall,” Isabel observed, “I had that strange man from the National Library. You know, the one who’s the expert on Highland place names, and who fidgets.
Nobody will sit next to him normally, and I believe he was actually hit over the head with a rolled-up programme at a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert—out of sheer irritation. No excuse, of course, but understandable. I have, of course, never hit anybody with a programme. Not once.”
Jamie laughed. This was a typical Isabel comment, and it delighted him. Everybody else was so literal; she could turn a situation on its head and render it painfully funny by some peculiar observation. “Maybe it’s the way the music takes him,”
he said. “My pupils fidget a lot.”
Jamie was a musician, a bassoonist who supplemented his earnings as a member of a chamber orchestra with the proceeds of teaching. His pupils were mostly teenagers, who traipsed up the stairs of his Stockbridge flat once a week for their lessons.
For the most part they were promising players, but there were several who attended under parental duress,
