and she, stupidly, had started on about Defoe and Man Friday having only one foot, when what she should have said was,
A lifetime. And Robert Graves wrote a poem about the bird of love and said that when he is in your grasp you must clutch him tightly; and there was Herrick, too, busy gathering his rosebuds, as everybody could recite, or at least everybody who had sat at the feet of the dry-as-dust Miss Macleod at George Watson’s Ladies College in George Square; all these poets who warned us, warned us not to lose the opportunity, and yet we did, as Miss Macleod herself had obviously done.
“Yes,” said Jamie, suddenly. “Yes. We could go off somewhere. I’ve always wanted to go to Kerala. I’ve always wanted to see—what’s the name of that place? Cochin?”
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“It’s Kochi now,” said Isabel. “But it’s the same place.” She paused. The sun had won the struggle with the mist and there was a broad ray of light slanting in from the window onto Jamie’s red Turkish rug. Tiny flecks of dust floated in the light, like miniature planes swirling in space. She looked up at Jamie. “I’d like that,” she said. “I went to Cochin once. I could show you.”
Jamie had taken a step forward and was standing in front of her. The ray of sun now fell on his forearm. Isabel saw how it penetrated the thin cotton of his shirt, revealing the arm beneath. When she was a child she had held her hand up to the light and imagined that she could see the bones of her fingers through the flesh. And one of the boys from further down the street, the one who became a doctor and who died in Mozam-bique, had possessed a pair of X-ray specs which he had donned and claimed to be able to see through clothing. She thought of him from time to time, and of his sad, avoidable death at the hands of a youthful carjacker, and saw not the grown man, who had tried to do something about human suffering, but the small boy with his X-ray specs and his tricks.
“Look at this reed,” Jamie said, handing Isabel the shaved double reed that fitted to the end of the bassoon’s elegant crook.
“Look how badly it’s twisted. I’ve used it four, maybe five times, and now this.”
She took the reed from him and examined it. It was an intricately made, rather fiddly object: two thin strips of reed, curved, laid side to side, and then bound at the base in a neat turban of red thread. Jamie sometimes made his own reeds, but he also bought them from a man who lived on a farm somewhere in England. He had spoken of this man before, who was called Ben, and she had imagined a bucolic scene with Ben sitting under a tree in his farmyard, shaving and tying reeds, while 8 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h geese strutted around him. It would not be like that, of course; the farm would have stopped producing anything except bassoon and oboe reeds, and Ben would be a displaced urbanite.
“They’re such odd-looking things,” said Isabel. “And they make that ridiculous squawk when you blow them. Not that I can do it.”
Jamie took the reed from her hand. “You don’t know how to do it properly. I’ll show you.” He turned the reed round so that the tip was towards Isabel. “Open your lips. Just a little bit. Like this. See. Like this.”
She did so, and he positioned the reed, but then withdrew it suddenly, and the back of his hand was against her lips, pressed gently against them. It was as if he had given his hand to be kissed in some courtly gesture. He moved it away. He was looking at her. Now he leaned forward and the hand kiss became a real kiss. Just briefly. Then he drew back and stared down at the carpet, at the now-enlarged square of sunlight.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled without looking at her. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”
She was about to reassure him, to reach out and take his hand, but he had turned away. “I was going to make you coffee,”
he said. “Come through to the kitchen. Or stay in here, if you prefer. I can bring it through.”
Isabel said that she would go with him, and she followed him into the kitchen. She looked at the nape of his neck. She looked at his shirt, tucked carelessly into his jeans; for some reason, she glanced at her watch and noticed the time, as if to commit to memory the moment, the precise moment, of her transformation.
He busied himself with the making of coffee. He could have turned round, but his back was to her and the thought 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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crossed her mind that this was to hide his embarrassment. He made a remark about a concert in which he was to play the following week. He said something about one of the pieces of music, about how he had met the composer and of how disappointing it had been. “He had nothing to say about his work, you know; nothing.”
Isabel said, “People don’t always like to talk about what they’ve done.” And she thought immediately: Yes, he had kissed her and now would not talk about it. She had not meant it in that sense, but Jamie picked up on it. “Sometimes we do things on impulse,” he said. “And the best thing may be to pretend that it never happened. But that hardly applies to a composition, surely?”
It was a ridiculous idea, and they both laughed, which went some way to defusing the tension. But when he brought over her cup of coffee, she noticed that his hand was shaking very slightly. The sight touched her. So he had been affected by what had happened in the same way as she had. It had been something important for him, not just a peck on the cheek between friends.
She put her coffee down on the square pine table that dominated the kitchen and sat on one of the chairs beside it.
“Jamie—” she began, but he cut her off.
“Let’s not,” he said. “Let’s not go there.”
For a moment she felt wounded. It seemed to her that he was viewing their moment of intimacy with distaste, as one would remember but decline to dissect a social solecism. And what exactly did
