Isabel’s expression was serious. The truth was a serious matter. “Of course I do,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell me anything but the truth, would you?”
“People sometimes don’t want to hear everything about their parents,” said Mimi. “Not everything.”
Isabel was vehement in her denial of this. She wanted to hear it all, she said. After all, it’s not as if there were any serious skeletons in the cupboard.
Mimi stopped and stared at Isabel. “But what if there were?”
Isabel’s answer came quickly. “I’d want to hear about them,”
she said. “Definitely.”
Mimi seemed unconvinced. “Are you sure?”
“Very sure. And the fact that you’ve mentioned this means that there is something.” She paused. “Tell me, Mimi. You have to tell me now.”
“I hadn’t planned to,” said Mimi, doubtfully. “It’s not . . .”
Isabel spoke gravely now. “Please. You’ve made me doubt—
not that I’m blaming you for that—but you have. You can’t stop 9 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now.” If Mimi left anything unsaid now, then it would prey on her mind. She might even wonder if her mother had tried to have somebody killed—ridiculous thought. The grocer, perhaps. Or one of her bridge four—for irresponsible bidding.
Mimi spoke evenly, in a matter-of-fact way, as a lawyer might do in addressing a court. “Your mother had an affair,” said Mimi. “She had an affair and never had the chance to confess to your father, or to make her peace with him. It was while she was having the affair that she discovered she was ill—that she was diagnosed with cancer. And by then she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. So he never found out. Or that’s what she told me. Which was better, don’t you think?” She had not understood why Hibby had had that affair. Sex? Is that all that affairs were about, or was it boredom, the sense of being trapped, the need for a form of companionship that a spouse cannot provide?
Their marriage had been a good one, Mimi had thought, and there had been no signs of an itch. But that, perhaps, was what itches were by nature: invisible.
They were halfway down the street. Isabel did not stop, but looked firmly at the pavement below her feet. The concrete was broken—the result of years of civic neglect, because this was a prosperous area and the authorities had other priorities. The well-off are never popular; they are tolerated, envied too, but not actually liked. She saw one or two places where weeds had taken hold in the cracks and had forced the surface upwards with the power of their roots. She listened to Mimi.
“And the man with whom she had this affair,” Mimi went on, “this man, who’s still around by the way—I saw him the other day, here in town—he dropped her; he dropped your mother when he heard that she was ill. That wasn’t his plan, you see. Your mother was very attractive, and it was fine to have an T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
9 7
affair with a beautiful, engaging woman, even if she was somebody else’s wife—that made it more exciting for him, I suppose.
But it was quite another thing to have an affair with a woman who was dying of breast cancer. The sick are not romantic, not really, in spite of Rodolfo and my namesake in their garret. It’s a different sort of love that puts up with illness. Old love.”
They were at Isabel’s gate now. Mimi looked anxiously at her. She wondered whether she should have told her. She had never intended to, but Isabel had insisted, and she had thought that it was the right thing to do. But now, looking at Isabel, she wondered whether it would have been better to lie.
“Should I have told you all that?” she asked, taking hold of Isabel’s arm. “Or should I have kept it from you?”
Isabel was a philosopher. She was perfectly aware that in moral philosophy it was widely agreed that paternalism was unjustifiable except in a very limited number of cases. We should not lie to people, and we should not keep from them the truth that they want to hear. Of course Mimi should have told her, because truth had to be told. And yet, could she ever use the expression my
She had had an affair. Well. She was human. Red-blooded.
Women had affairs all the time; only a false sense of propriety made us pretend that this did not happen; the Madame Bovary within us, she thought, within every married woman. But what about this man, the man who had treated her so shabbily? What had been the allure that had driven her mother—her
This other man. What was he like?”
“He was much younger than she was,” said Mimi.
C H A P T E R N I N E
E
LATER THAT DAY, Isabel stood in Rutland Square, that quiet, perfect Georgian square tucked away behind the busy end of Princes Street, under the shadow, almost, of the castle and its towering Calvinist rock. Like so many places in the city, it had its associations for her. There was the Scottish Arts Club on the other side, where she had gone to parties that had gone on into the small hours, where utterly memorable conversations had taken place, and been forgotten in spite of their brilliance; there was the corner where, during her student days, home from Cambridge, she had embraced that boy she had met in the bar at the Caledonian Hotel, that student from Aberdeen, who had met up with her a few evenings later and with whom she had enjoyed a brief flirtation; and then he had gone back to Aberdeen and she had realised that they meant nothing to each other. That was before John Liamor, about whom now, curiously, she seemed to be thinking less.
