The Right Attitude to Rain

never allowed herself to lose a political battle, and the fight between mothers wanting to hold on to their sons and the women who wanted to take their sons away was a battle royal, more dogged than the Battle of Bannockburn, more poignant than the clash at Culloden Moor.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

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SHE CLIMBED THE STAIRS to Jamie’s flat in Saxe-Coburg Street. She occasionally called in unannounced, which he did not seem to mind, and he did the same to her; neither was offended if the other was busy and made that apparent. Jamie had to practise, and she had to edit. Both knew that these activities took precedence over social activities.

He had an old-fashioned bell pull, which he had restored to working order and of which he was inordinately proud. A small brass arm, complete with clenched hand and cuffs, that hung at the side of his door could be pulled downwards, causing a bell inside to sound briefly. A couple of tugs would produce a longer, more insistent peal. Isabel pulled the bell handle, glancing at the fanlight above the door. The glass in the fanlight, Jamie had said, was the original pane put in when the tenement was built in 1850. “You can tell old glass,” he said. “It is thicker at the bottom than at the top. It’s liquid, you see. It very slowly sags downwards.” Like people, thought Isabel.

Jamie answered the door and from his expression she knew immediately that he was not busy; this was not the I’m-in-the-8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h middle-of-something face. He smiled at her and gestured for her to come in. “I was about to phone you,” he said.

Isabel took off the light raincoat she had been wearing—it was one of those days which could not decide between wet and dry—and hung it over the chair in the hallway. Jamie’s flat was not large: a small hallway gave onto a living room off which was a bedroom; these rooms, together with a generous-sized kitchen and a cramped bathroom, completed the accommoda-tion. Jamie taught bassoon in the living room, where there was an upright piano in one corner. Most of his teaching was done in schools, but the occasional private pupil came to the flat, especially boys from the Academy, which was more or less next door.

If the wind was in the right direction, as it was now, one might hear the school’s pipe band practising, the wailing of the pipes drifting across the rooftops. It could be worse, Jamie had said.

Imagine living in Ramsey Garden and having the Military Tat-too taking place in one’s backyard every night for a month. And Isabel had listened for a moment and said: “I have nothing against ‘Lochaber No More.’ That’s what they’re playing.”

“Something like that,” said Jamie. “I don’t notice it, really.

It’s just part of the background. Like the traffic.”

Isabel listened. There was no traffic sound, as far as she could tell, just the pipes. She glanced at Jamie. How strange it must be to be entirely beautiful—did one think about it?

Did one see the heads turn? He did not, she thought; he seemed blissfully unaware of what he looked like, and seemed not to care. He was just easy with it, which was part of his charm. There was nothing more unattractive than narcissism, she thought; nothing could transform beauty into a cloying, unattractive quality than that self- conscious appreciation of self. There was none of that in Jamie.

T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

8 3

“Mimi and I were talking about it. ‘Lochaber No More,’ ” said Isabel. “That McTaggart upstairs in my house made me think about it. And now . . .” She moved to the living-room window and looked out over the roofs towards the Academy. The pipes died away; the last notes had been reached. The air now seemed very still; what had been light rain was now mist, and there were signs of the sun trying to break through. “That’s the trouble with our weather,” she continued. “It doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

“I like it,” said Jamie. “It keeps us on our toes. I’m not sure that I would like the predictability of living in Sicily or somewhere like that. I’d miss our skies.”

“I suppose so,” said Isabel. “But then, every so often I have this yearning to go away altogether. To get away from Scotland and its weather. I could very easily live in the south of France, you know. In fact, I may go one of these days.”

Jamie, who had been standing near the piano, fiddling with a bassoon reed, looked up sharply. “You’re not seriously thinking of going, are you?” There was an edge of anxiety in his voice, which Isabel had noticed and which had given her a sudden, wild moment of hope. He did not want her to go.

She smiled at him. “A fantasy,” she said. “From time to time I see myself doing something completely different, something exotic, but I never do anything about it. And it’s not just the south of France. It’s Thailand, Cambodia, India. Can’t you see yourself in a small village on one of those Thai islands, leading the life of a Gauguin . . . that was the South Seas of course. Not exactly next door.”

“Or Robert Louis Stevenson,” interjected Jamie.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Or RLS. Yes. But not quite.”

“Maybe we could go away together,” mused Jamie. “You could be Robinson Crusoe and I could be your Man Friday.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel laughed. “Have you ever looked at Defoe’s illustra-tions?” she asked. “Have you noticed that all that Robinson Crusoe sees on the beach is a single footprint? Not two footprints, just one. Have you ever thought of how odd that is?”

“Because he had two feet?”

“Precisely. When we see him later in the book, he definitely has two legs and two feet. We see him.”

“He must have been hopping at the time.” Jamie suggested.

“Very odd.”

“Yes. Authorial inattention. I see it all the time when I’m editing the Review. Even my philosophers can be very sloppy.”

Then she thought: He said, Maybe we could go away together. He had said that,