The Right Attitude to Rain

very strongly of somebody I knew in Dallas, somebody just like him. He lived with his 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h mother near the country club in Highland Park. In one of those large places on Beverly. She more or less wouldn’t let him out of her sight.”

Isabel remembered Beverly, with its ostentatious houses, mansions really, and their manicured lawns. And she imagined the mama’s boy on Beverly drinking iced tea under the revolving fan, watched by a Dallas matron, from her chair, vigilant. “And?”

she said.

“The mother saw off the poor boy’s girlfriends,” Mimi said.

“Saw them off. Every one of them.” It had been a matter of remark; people had laughed about it, although it was not a laughing matter, said Mimi. The mother had died, and for a time the son had remained where he was, in the same house, in thrall to the memory of the mother who was not there, stuck in the cautious rituals that she had instilled in him. Then he held a party, an immense blowout, and he went off with the party planner, a blonde from Fort Worth, who would have been the embodiment of his mother’s worst nightmare. “Not an intellectual,” observed Mimi. “The lady, that is.”

“So Cat . . .”

“May encounter a problem,” supplied Mimi. “Although we could be quite wrong, you know. Does that thought occur to you, Isabel? Do you think I could be quite wrong?”

That thought had occurred frequently. Isabel’s training as a philosopher would have been in vain had she not opened herself up to doubt. Doubt was a constant, a condition of her being. “Often,” said Isabel thoughtfully. Then she added, “But not now.”

They left it at that. Isabel felt uncomfortable talking about Patrick in this way. She reminded herself that she had resolved to make an effort to like him, and she would do that, for Cat’s 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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sake. It was really no business of hers if Cat should take up with a mama’s boy—or an obsessive, for that matter. Cat’s life was her own, and she, Isabel, would welcome whomsoever Cat chose to share her life with. Isabel would have wished that this had been Jamie, but it was not, and if it was going to be Patrick, then so be it. I shall make the most of him, thought Isabel. I really shall.

Patrick and I will become friends.

In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create the conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. Open then our hearts—these words came into her mind, dredged from somewhere in her memory, from some unknown context. If one opened one’s heart, then friendship, and love, too, might alight and make their presence known. It was the act of opening that came first; that was the important thing, the first thing. But who was it who said, Open then our hearts? Where did that come from?

C H A P T E R F I V E

E

MARMITE?” asked Isabel over breakfast.

“The National Library of Scotland,” said Joe, buttering a slice of toast. He applied only butter, scrupulously avoiding the open jar of Marmite which Isabel had placed in front of him.

She noticed the spurning of the Marmite. That, she said, was her test of acculturation. Only the most determined of anglophiles would eat Marmite, and not even all of those. For the rest, it was an inexplicable British taste, quite beyond sympathy. Drinking lukewarm beer and taking tea with lashings of milk were understandable, even to a Texan for whom iced tea was only natural; but to spread on one’s toast a salty black yeast paste was beyond comprehension. And Joe, who had been a Rhodes Scholar, and who liked nothing more than to spend the summer in a rambling house which they rented in Oxford, was an anglophile by any standard; but not by the measure of Marmite.

“Yes,” said Joe. “I intend to spend the day in the National Library of Scotland. And no thank you, I don’t like Marmite.”

“Working on your history of adoption?”

“Precisely. They have some very interesting material there.”

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Mimi reached for the coffee pot. “And I shall be trudging round the bookstores,” she said. “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff. I really don’t.”

Isabel applied Marmite to her toast. “Looking for?” Mimi was a serial book collector, moving from author to author. Her collection of Andrew Lang was virtually complete, as was that of Graham Greene firsts. Isabel continued, “It’s an acquired taste, I suppose. Like the hundred-year eggs that the Chinese eat. You know, the eggs they bury for a hundred days and then dig up and eat. They go wild over them.”

“Arthur Waley,” said Mimi in answer to Isabel’s question.

“He translated Chinese poetry. It was wonderful stuff. And he wrote biographies of some of his poets. It’s quite a thought, isn’t it—there they were in the eighth century or whenever it was and somebody should write their biography twelve hundred years later. An Englishman. So far away. Picking over the lives of these poets.”

That, Isabel agreed, was strange. But so was any act of hom-age to the classical world. Would Catullus have imagined that he would be read after millennia had passed? That people would show an interest in the small details of his life? No, said Mimi, Catullus probably would not. But Horace would. He described, she recollected, his poems as a monument more enduring than bronze; that had struck her as a sign of excessive ego. “But I don’t think that these Chinese poets would have imagined that degree of immortality,” she said. “They led rather remote lives. They were often exiled for some tiny faux pas committed at court. They were sent off to be magistrates in the remote provinces somewhere. And that made their poetry rather wistful, full of regrets.”