“Ah yes,” said Isabel. “Cat told me about the shoes. I remember now.”

Tomasso nodded. “She met many members of my family at the wedding. That is where I met her. At one of the parties.”

“And that is when you decided that you would come to see her in Scotland?”

His right hand moved to his left cuff, which he fingered.

She noticed the manicured nails. There were no men in Scotland with manicured nails.

“That is when I decided to come to Scotland,” he said. “I have one or two things to do here. Family things. But I also hoped to get to know Cat better. I did not think that she would be so busy.”

“Perhaps she considers you too old for her,” said Isabel, and she thought, family things. What did he mean by family things?

Mafia things?

He did not react immediately. He looked down at the plate to his side, and dabbed at an imaginary crumb with a forefinger.

Then: “In Italy, you know, it is not at all unusual for a man in his early forties—which is what I am—to marry a girl in her early twenties. That is normal, in fact.” He looked at her evenly, holding her gaze.

“That’s interesting,” said Isabel. “It’s not normal 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 Maybe because we consider that equality is important in relationships. The woman in those circumstances will never be the equal of the man.”

He drew back slightly at her comment, feigning surprise.

“Equality? Who wants equality?”

“I do, for one,” said Isabel.

“Do you really?” he asked. “Are you sure about that? Don’t you find equality a little bit . . . well, dull?”

Isabel thought for a moment. Yes, he was right. Equality was dull, and goodness was dull, too, if one reflected on it; and Nietz-sche, of course, would have agreed. Peace was dull; conflict and violence were exciting. And this man, sitting on the other side of the table from her, was far from dull.

“Yes,” she said. “It is a bit dull. But then I’d probably prefer dullness to unfairness. I’d rather live in a society that was fair to its citizens than one in which there was great injustice. I’d rather live in Sweden than . . .” She had to think. What had happened to all the truly dreadful countries? Where were they? The usual whipping boys, exhausted by criticism, had caved in. But there were still places, were there not, where there were gross disparities of wealth and power. Paraguay? She had no idea.

They had been saddled with a picture-book dictator, but had he not been deposed? Were there still vast latifundia there? And what about those Arab countries where sheikhs and princes viewed the public treasuries as their private purses? There was plenty of injustice that nobody talked about very much. There was slavery still; debt bondage; enforced prostitution; trafficking in children. It was all there, but the voices that spoke about it were so hard to hear amongst all the trivia and noise and the profound loss of moral seriousness.

“Than where?” he pressed. “Than Italy?”

F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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“Of course not. I would love to live in Italy.”

He held his hands apart, in a gesture of welcome. “Why not come? Why not move to the hills above Florence, like all those other British ladies?”

Perhaps he had intended the remark to be a compliment, or perhaps it had meant nothing very much. But he had said other British ladies, and that put her into the category of artistic spinsters and eccentrics who haunted places like Fiesole; not a glamorous set, but faded, chintzy, dreamy exponents of Botti-celli and Tuscan cookery; maiden aunts, actual or in the making. He had invited her to travel to the Highlands in his Bugatti, and she had almost accepted; but this, she thought, is how he sees me. I would be company; a guide; somebody to read the map and explain the massacre of Glencoe. And I, my head momentarily turned, had thought that I could possibly be of romantic or even sexual interest to this man.

The waiter arrived with the first course. He placed the plate in front of her, scallops on a bed of shredded red and green peppers. As she looked at her plate, she teetered on the edge of self-pity, and then pulled back. Why should I agonise? she asked herself. Why should I always weigh the rights and wrongs of things? What if I just acted? What if I became, for a short time, the huntress and showed him that I was not what he imagined?

What if I made a conquest?

She looked up. The waiter had a pepper mill in his hand and was offering her pepper. This always irritated her; that the pro-prietors of restaurants should not trust their pepper mills to the hands of their guests. But it was not the waiter’s fault, and she dismissed the thought.

She looked across the table. “I’d like to think about your offer of that trip,” she said. “Next week perhaps?”

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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 studied his reaction, watching for any sign. But he gave little away—little beyond the slightest twitch of a smile at the sides of his mouth and a brief change in the light in his eyes, a flicker, a change in reflection, brought about, no doubt, by a trick of light, a movement of the head.

C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

E

JAMIE DID NOT LIKE playing for the ballet. From where he sat in the orchestra pit, just beneath the overhang of the stage, he found the sound of the dancers’ feet disconcerting. This is what it would be like to live, he thought, on the first floor, with noisy neighbours on the second. But it was work, and well-paid work at that, and he thought it better than listening to his pupils. That afternoon, on the day after Isabel’s dinner with Tomasso, he had played for the Scottish Ballet in a matinee performance, and had agreed to meet Isabel in the

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