her cousin, Mimi, and did the things which teenagers of the time and place did: shopping at Neiman Marcus on Commerce Street, swimming at the club, waiting for something to happen, which it never did.
Then their paths had diverged. Hibby had gone to New York, to the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School, and had then worked for two years with a firm of Wall Street lawyers. Several of these lawyers would have been quite happy to marry her; she was good-looking and had that Southern charm that young men found irresistible. But she, in turn, found the attractions of a Scottish graduate student at Columbia Law School equally irresistible, and married Isabel’s father instead. Back in Mobile, they put a brave face on this, and those relatives who had met her intended husband reported positively. It was not the end of the world. Mimi, in particular, who had met Isabel’s father at the engagement party that Hibby held in New York, could not understand their misgivings. “Everything about him is perfect,”
she said. “Even his imperfections.”
Mimi’s marriage to Joe McKnight was a second marriage for both of them. Joe, a professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was an authority on Texas legal history and the law of the Spanish colonies, of which Texas had been one.
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His interests were antiquarian, and these were shared by Mimi, who dealt in rare books. Joe restored and rebound these books in the small bindery that he had set up in an upstairs room in their Dallas house, a room stacked with pots of glue, bolts of soft binding leather, all the tools of that trade. He knew all about these leathers and endpapers and bookworms. And Mimi knew all about choral music and old cookery books and cats.
They arrived in the early evening. Isabel had shown them to their room, the guest room at the back of the house, which, although it got little direct sunlight, had a view over the garden.
“The room we were in last time,” said Mimi. “And there’s that painting.” She crossed the room to look at the large oil hung on the wall above the chest of drawers. A man and his wife, their arms around two young children, huddled together on the deck of a sailing ship. Behind them the waves were swelling, whipped to white at the crests, almost obscuring the shores of a distant island. “That’s Skye, isn’t it?” she asked.
Isabel nodded. “McTaggart,” she said. “And yes, I think that it is Skye. He painted quite a few pictures like that. People leaving Scotland, setting off for their new lives in Nova Scotia or Boston, or wherever it was.”
Mimi stood before the large picture, which she gazed at through her large oval glasses. “And off they went,” she said.
“Look at the children’s expressions. Look at them.”
Isabel joined Mimi in front of the painting. She was not particularly fond of McTaggart, and this explained the painting’s presence in the guest bedroom, where she rarely saw it. It had been a favourite of her father’s, though; he liked nineteenth-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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century Romantic painters and had bought this cheaply at an auction, one of the first paintings he acquired, and had given it to Isabel’s mother. Isabel suspected that her mother had not liked it either, but had never said as much.
The children in the painting seemed impervious to their fate. The parents saw before them only a hazardous sea voy-age, weeks of seasickness and privation, and, at the end of it all, a landing in a hard and unknown country. For the children, though, setting sail was a great adventure. The boy, his face bright with excitement, was pointing at a seagull that was riding the boat’s slipstream; the girl was saying something to a doll she was clutching—some maternal words of encouragement, a lul-laby perhaps.
“It makes me think of ‘Lochaber No More,’ ” said Isabel.
“Do you know that song, Mimi? It’s about leaving Scotland.
About never again seeing the place you’ve loved.”
Mimi, lost in the painting, said nothing.
Isabel recited:
Mimi turned to Isabel. “But that’s very beautiful,” she said.
“Sad. Sad and beautiful. To be
Isabel smiled. “That’s what this country’s like, you know. It has a way of surprising you. It’s hard to be indifferent to it.” She turned away from the McTaggart. “But I have things to do. We’re having company for dinner.”
She was aware as she spoke that she had unconsciously 5 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h slipped into an American idiom. People in Edinburgh did not have company in the way in which they did in America. They had guests.
“Guests?” asked Mimi.
“Yes,” said Isabel. “Cat.”
“Good,” said Mimi. “I have a gift for her. And Joe has always had a soft spot for Cat, haven’t you, Joe?”
“Yes,” said Joe. “Nice girl.”
“And she has a new boyfriend, Patrick,” said Isabel. “He’s coming with her.”
Mimi and Isabel exchanged glances. Mimi had heard of Toby, and of the others; or at least she had heard Isabel’s version.
