Isabel thought for a moment. She was trying to remember 6 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h something by Li Po. She had Waley’s translation of his works in her library, but could only remember a poem about drinking wine by oneself. That was all.
“Li Po drank wine by himself,” she began.
“Indeed he did,” said Mimi. “But so did many of the others.
Chinese poets were always drinking wine and then writing about it. Or waiting for boats to arrive from downriver. Or wondering what absent friends were up to. Brooding about what they were doing.”
“That,” said Isabel, “is the most painful feature of lost love.
You wonder what the other person is doing. Right at this moment. What is he doing?”
There was silence for a moment. Joe put down his slice of toast and looked at his plate. Mimi, from behind the rim of her coffee cup, watched Isabel and thought:
W I T H M I M I A N D J O E off on their respective outings, Isabel had the house to herself. It was Grace’s day off, and she had gone to Glasgow to visit a cousin. The house, without Grace, seemed unnaturally quiet, but it gave Isabel the opportunity to work without interruption on her editing. Her desk was piled with manuscripts, the consequence of her dogged adherence to a policy of requiring the submission of articles in printed, rather than electronic, form. She could not read on screen, or at least not for long; the sentences and paragraphs became strangely disjointed, as if they were cut off from that which went before and that which came afterwards. That, of course, was an illu-sion; such paragraphs were just round the corner, just a scroll away—but where was that. Was electronic memory a
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Before they appeared on the screen weren’t they just endless lines of noughts and ones, or odd decimals? That, she thought, was the ultimate triumph of reductionism: Shakespeare’s son-nets could be reduced to rows of noughts; or even the works of Proust; although how much electricity would be consumed to render Proust’s long- winded prose digital? Patient wind tur-bines would turn and turn for days in that process. And what about ourselves, and our own reduction? We could each be rendered, could we not, down to a little puddle of water and a tiny heap of minerals. And that was all we were.
Or, as binary code might so prosaically put it: 0100100101101
10101110000 . . .
She worked quickly, and by the time that her lawyer telephoned her she had managed to make an impression on the pile of manuscripts; she had read three, and had embarked on the fourth. None of them, she thought, was likely to get past the peer reviewers, which was sad, as each represented months of effort: thought, planning, hopes. But the problem was that they all had the feel of being written to order, by people who had to write these articles—any articles—because they were academ-ics and it was expected of them. This was their output, the basis on which they would be judged; not on whether they were inspirational teachers who could hold a class of students spellbound, could inspire them to think, but on the production of this sheer
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of controversy. Should archaeologists rebury them, or can museums . . .” She sighed again, and imagined for a moment archaeologists digging up old bones, so carefully, with their trowels and brushes, and then, more or less immediately, burying them once more, with reverence.
She rose to her feet to answer the lawyer’s call, taking the telephone with her to the window of her study.
Simon Mackintosh’s voice was precise. “That place that you looked at,” he began. “The one in St. Stephen Street—I registered your interest in it with the seller’s lawyers, as you asked me to do.”
“Good,” said Isabel. “And I’ve decided that I’d like to make an offer. I liked it very much. I was going to call you today to talk about what offer we should put in.” Isabel did not like the Scottish system of selling houses. A property went on the market with an invitation for offers, giving a general guide to where offers should start. But then what started was a blind auction: anybody interested in buying it could put in their best offer in a sealed envelope and, at a preordained time, these would be opened and the highest bidder—normally—would win the auction. This was all very well for sellers, but for purchasers it created an agony of uncertainty, driving people to offer the very most they could afford, just in case somebody else came up with a bigger offer.
Simon laughed. “Well, I’m saving you that call—and with good news. The woman who’s selling it . . .”
“Florence Macreadie.”
“Yes,” Simon continued. “Her lawyer telephoned me and said that she would be very happy to sell it to you— and at a price which is actually lower than the current starting price. Ten thousand below, in fact. So it’s yours if you want it.”
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Isabel said nothing as she absorbed this news. She had never been obliged to bid for a house before, but everything that she had heard from friends who had done so had made her dread the process. It seemed that everyone had their stories of missed properties, of offers that had seemed to be high and yet turned out to be far too low, of houses lost to an offer only five pounds higher; and yet here she was being offered a flat in a popular area of town at a sum below the starting price.
“Isabel?”
“Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I was thinking. I was trying to take in what you said to me. Ten thousand . . .”
Simon sounded bemused. “Below. Yes. Ten thousand below.”
So, thought Isabel, she’s desperate to sell. This means that there is some snag. The neighbours? Basil, the cat they met on the stairway? Ground subsidence affecting the foundations of the building? Fulminating wet rot in the roof space?
