go on about forgiveness. Yes, I’ve heard you. And yet do you practise it yourself?”
She looked at him. “So now you’re accusing me of hypocrisy as well as snobbery? Is that it?”
“Oh, Isabel, for God’s sake . . .”
She closed her eyes. He was right in what he said about forgiveness; it was just that she was vulnerable to insensitive words from him—not that his words had been particularly insensitive—and this vulnerability was all the greater because she could not talk to him about it. To him she was just another friend, nothing more, and one could talk like that to a mere friend. And that, she thought, is my personal tragedy. As long as I am afraid to tell him of my love, to confess it to him, then I shall have to pretend that we are just friends on this level. But I cannot tell him. That would end even the friendship. He would be appalled. He would run away.
“We’re arguing over nothing,” she said. “Of course I know you didn’t mean it. Sorry.”
They resumed their walk up the hill. At the top of Gloucester Lane, the mews houses gave way to broader, more elegant streets, to Heriot Row and Darnaway Street. Heriot Row, which faced south, was a long sweep of Georgian terrace, with formal gardens on the other side. It was a street and an attitude rolled into one; most of those who lived here played the part expected of them and furnished their houses and flats with Georgian furniture. The high windows of the drawing-room floors were draped with long-drop curtains, bunched at the sides, secured with formal tassels; the windows at street level afforded a glimpse of dining rooms with rise-and-fall lights above large mahogany tables, of grand pianos, of book-lined studies. It was a world which Isabel understood, and in which she could move, and yet 4 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h it was not the world in which she chose to live. There was a deadness of the soul in such places, she thought; it was like being in a museum, living a life devoid of colour and spontaneity.
“Heriot Row has always given me the creeps,” she said.
Jamie looked up at the windows. “I don’t know,” he said. “I went to a party here once. I didn’t get the creeps. In fact, it was rather fun.”
“It’s too perfect,” she said. “I suppose most cities have places which are just too perfect. There’s Mayfair in London. All very clean and well looked after. But sterile too. And there are those streets in the smart parts of New York. The ones with those unwelcoming doormen. Too rarefied for me.”
She was about to say something about Paris, too, when something caught her eye. She and Jamie were about to cross the road when a car swung down from Wemyss Place and turned right into Heriot Row.
“That’s a beauty of a car,” Jamie said. “Look at it.”
Isabel was uninterested in cars, but interested in those within. And in this case she recognised them, the man and the woman from the gallery. He was at the wheel, occupied with driving, but the woman turned and looked at Isabel and Jamie as the car went past. She looked at Isabel for only a moment, a look which gave no sign of recognition; then her eyes moved to Jamie, and for a brief second she stared at him before the car moved beyond them and made its way down Heriot Row.
“That woman looked at you,” said Isabel. “Did you see?”
“What a stunner,” said Jamie.
“Not close up,” said Isabel. “I met her in the Scottish Gallery.”
“I was talking about her car,” said Jamie.
A few minutes later they parted company. Jamie had to visit 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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an insurance office in Castle Street and so they said goodbye at the corner of Hill Street. Then Isabel continued her walk home, thinking, as she did, of the coincidence of seeing the American visitors twice in so short a time. What were they doing? Who were they? She was barely any further along the road to knowing anything about that than she had been when she first saw them from the window of Glass and Thompson. But why that should be of the slightest importance, she had no idea. She meant nothing to them, and they should mean nothing to her. And yet they did.
C H A P T E R F O U R
E
MY DEAR,” said Mimi McKnight, “just look at us! Bedrag-gled! In need of . . . well, in need of everything, I suspect.
Hydration, certainly.”
Isabel had offered to fetch Joe and Mimi from the airport, but had been firmly turned down. They would find a taxi, they said, and arrive under their own steam, which they did, laden with several months’ worth of luggage and gifts for Isabel and the various others with whom they would be staying on their trip. Isabel received two large bottles of Tabasco sauce, a copy of Robert Lowell’s
Mimi was first cousin to Isabel’s mother, Hibby. Mimi was from Dallas, but Hibby had been born and raised in Mobile, on the Alabama coast, a city of elegant oaks and long stories of the blood. Mobile was a proud place, and did not care for the ignorant condescension of outsiders. “We invented Mardi Gras,”
Isabel had been told by her mother. “New Orleans thinks it did, but it’s wrong. We did. That’s your heritage, Isabel.” But there was another side to the heritage of well-to-do Mobile, of course: the dark side of the South—and this was not talked about, or T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
5 1
used not to be. It was there, though, and could be seen in the musty family photograph albums, where the servants stood in the background, under a tree, beside the cars, carrying things.
That’s what can lie behind money, thought Isabel; not always, but often: expropriated lives; the lives of people in the background, nameless, forgotten, who never really owned very much.
As a teenager Isabel’s mother had been sent to Dallas in the summer, away from the humidity of the Gulf Coast and into dry heat of the Texas plains, thought to be better for you and more tolerable. There she stayed with
