because he needs to express his gratitude. But there’s another thing—he can say to you that farewell that you and your son did not exchange.
Look. Look.” She reached out and took Ian’s hand and turned it over, to expose his wrist. “Put your hand there, Euan. Can you feel that pulse? Can you feel it? That is your son’s heart. Your son would forgive you, you know, Euan. Your son would forgive you anything that you felt needed forgiving. That’s true, isn’t it, Ian?”
Ian began to say something, but could not continue, and so he nodded his assent and clasped the hand above his, firmly, in 2 5 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a token of forgiveness and gratitude. Isabel left them together for a few moments. She crossed the room to the window and looked out on the village, at the lights and the darkening sky.
Rain had set in, not heavy rain, but a gentle shower, drifting, soft, falling on the narrow village street and her green Swedish car and the hills, dark shapes, beyond.
“I see that it has started to rain,” she said. “And we must get back to Edinburgh soon.”
Euan looked up. She saw that he was smiling, and she knew from this that she had been right; that something had happened in those moments, something which she had thought might happen, but which she had not allowed herself to hope for too much, for fear of disappointment. I am often wrong, thought Isabel, but sometimes right— like everybody else.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T H R E E
E
GRACE PUT THE MAIL on Isabel’s desk.
“Not very many letters this morning,” she said. “Four, in fact.”
“What matters is the quality,” said Isabel, shuffling through the envelopes. “New York, Melbourne, London, and Edinburgh.”
“Edinburgh is the fish bill,” said Grace. “Smell the envelope. They write the bills out in that funny little office they have at the back of the shop. Their hands smell of fish when they do it. One can always tell the fish bill.”
Isabel raised the plain brown envelope to her nose. “I see what you mean,” she said. “Of course, people used to send perfumed letters. I had an aunt who put a very peculiar perfume on her letters. I loved that as a child. I am not sure whether I’d be so keen on it now.”
“I think that we come back to these things,” said Grace. “I loved rice pudding as a girl. Then I couldn’t touch it. Now I must say that I rather look forward to rice pudding.”
“Didn’t Lin Yutang say something about that?” mused Isabel. “Didn’t he ask: What is patriotism but the love of the good things that one ate in childhood?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace laughed. “Grub first, then ethics. That’s what I say.”
Isabel began to say, “Brecht . . . ,” but stopped herself in time. She picked up the envelope which bore the New York postmark. Slitting it open, she extracted a letter and unfolded it.
For a few minutes she was silent, absorbed in the letter. Grace watched her.
She was smiling. “This is a very important letter, Grace,” she said. “This is from Professor Edward Mendelson. He’s the literary executor of W. H. Auden. I wrote to him, and this is his reply.”
Grace was impressed. She had not read Auden, but had heard him quoted many times by her employer. “I’ll get round to reading him,” she had said, but they both doubted if she would.
Grace did not read poetry—Grace’s razor.
“I wrote to him with an idea,” said Isabel. “Auden wrote a poem in which he uses imagery which is very reminiscent of Burns. There are lines in ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ about loving somebody
“Of course,” said Grace. “I love that song. Kenneth McKel-lar sings it beautifully. He made me fall in love with him. But there must be so many people who fell in love with him. Just like they all fell in love with Placido Domingo.”
“I don’t recall falling in love with Placido Domingo,” said Isabel. “How careless of me!”
“But Auden? What’s he got to do with Burns?”
“He taught for a short time in Scotland,” said Isabel. “As a very young man. He taught in a boarding school over in Helens-burgh. And he must have taught the boys Burns. Every Scottish schoolchild learnt Burns in those days. And still should, for that matter. You learnt Burns, didn’t you? I did.”
F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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“I learnt ‘To a Mouse,’ ” said Grace. “And half of ‘Tam O’Shanter.’ ”
“And ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’?”
“Yes,” said Grace, and for a moment the two women looked at one another, and Isabel thought: This is one of the things that binds us together—in all the privilege of my life, in all that has been given to me through no effort of my own, I am bound to my fellow citizens in the common humanity that Burns spelled out for us. We are equal. Not one of us is more than the other.
We are equal—which was the way she wanted it; she would have no other compact. And that is why when, at the reopening of the Scottish Parliament after those hundreds of years of abeyance, a woman had stood up and sung “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” there had been few hearts in disagreement. It was the rock to which the country, the culture, was anchored; a consti-tution, a charter of rights, written in song.
“I wrote to Edward Mendelson,” Isabel went on, “because I thought I could detect Burns—the influence of Burns—in one of Auden’s lines. And now he’s written back to me.”
“And said?”
