The Right Attitude to Rain

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sons why he should think that way about it, and Isabel had thought about them all. And dominating everything was the sheer brute fact that fourteen years lay between them. Fourteen years. Jamie would want a contemporary; indeed she knew which contemporary he really wanted. Cat. And Cat was her niece. Did that not make matters problematic?

And yet, and yet . . . Would anybody raise an eyebrow if a man of thirty-eight took up with a woman of twenty- four? That was a gap of fourteen years, and there were plenty of such liaisons, which people seemed to accept readily enough. How old were Levin and Kitty? That sort of thing was quite different from the real cradle-snatch, from Humbert Humbert and his Lolita. She and Jamie were two adults, one a bit older than the other, but with the same interests and the same sense of humour. Why should I not love him? she asked herself. How absurd that we should deny ourselves something when our moment of life is so brief, our very world so transitory.

And now, sitting with her coffee, in silence, she thought of Auden’s line: how rich life had been and how silly. She knew what that meant, she understood it; but the difficulty lay in trying to explain to somebody that it didn’t matter, it simply didn’t matter. Jamie did not want to take a risk. She now did. They were simply not in the same place. She was here, and he was there. That was the topography of unrequited love; there were many hills, unscalable peaks, continents separated by wide oceans of misunderstanding, of indifference.

She drained the last of her coffee, glanced at her watch and rose from her seat. She took a step forward and placed a kiss on the side of his cheek, a chaste kiss of the sort that friends give one another. She noticed that he was tense as she approached him—the body conveys so much without movement of any 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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sort—and then the tension dissolved after her kiss. “I have to go.”

He nodded. “And I have a pupil coming in”—he looked at his watch—“fifteen minutes.”

She said goodbye and made her way down the stairs. Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn’t. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place.

C H A P T E R E I G H T

E

IT WAS MIMI who suggested over breakfast that Isabel should meet their hosts before they went to spend the weekend with them. “They come into Edinburgh a lot,” she said. “And Joe and I would like to entertain them. It would be a way of returning their hospitality before the occasion, so to speak.”

Isabel agreed; it would give her an opportunity to meet Tom and Angie before she went to stay with them, which would be helpful. The meeting in the gallery, such as it was, had not been a positive one, and a relaxed meeting in a social setting could help. They could come to her house, she suggested, but Mimi objected that this would not involve Joe and her reciprocating hospitality. Isabel still thought it better. Angie had snubbed her once already, in the gallery; she could hardly do that in Isabel’s own home. “Mimi, you cook,” Isabel said. “It can be your show.

I’ll hand over the kitchen. And you’re a better cook than I am.

Far better.”

There was another reason why dinner at her house would be a good idea. She had not seen Jamie since that afternoon encounter in his flat, and she was waiting for an occasion when they could see one another in the company of other people; this 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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would make it easier. She would put it to him that she needed to make up numbers—which she did—and he would not think that she was pursuing him. Which she was not—she was definitely not pursuing him—but did she want to see him again, and soon? Yes, she did.

When she called him with the invitation, she was relieved to discover that everything seemed normal. He would be very happy to come to dinner, he said. He was having a trying week of rehearsals with a conductor who for some reason didn’t like him. Isabel privately thought that unlikely; nobody could dislike Jamie, except Cat perhaps, and that was odd, and Cat’s fault, her blind spot, her perversity.

But Jamie was sure. “He has it in for me,” he told Isabel.

“He always picks on me. Always. He says that I don’t have the dynamics quite right. He says my playing sounds feverish. What does he mean by that?”

“Con fuoco,” said Isabel. “That’s the closest I can get to it.”

“But why do you think he picks on me?” Jamie asked peevishly.

Isabel could guess. Envy. That, in her mind, was one of the commonest causes of petty behaviour like that. “He envies you,”

she said.

Jamie laughed. “Why should he envy me? He’s a successful conductor. Much in demand—for some inexplicable reason. He has no reason to envy anybody.”

At the other end of the telephone, Isabel smiled. “Do I know him?” she asked. “Describe him to me.”

Jamie gave her the name, which she did not recognise.

Then he went on, “He’s on the short side. Rather pudgy. Gets red in the face when the tempo increases. Waves his arms about.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Envy, she thought. Jamie was tall. He was good- looking. He never went red in the face. What she was tempted to say was: He wants to be you, or, perhaps, more poignantly, He wants you and cannot have you, but she could not say that. Jamie would not imagine that he could be the object of desire; it was not in his nature to think that. So she simply said, “Envy,” and left it at that.