The Right Attitude to Rain

Was she? Since she had met John, just over twenty years ago, she had thought about him, one way or another, every day.

In the beginning, when she had been in his thrall, she had thought about him all day; he was just there, constantly, and her 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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thoughts of him were pleasant, almost numbing, like the feeling, she imagined, that an opiate would give. Then, when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of his students, she had thought about him with anxiety and alarm, as one thinks of somebody whom one is afraid to lose. And that had been replaced by resentment and anger and aching feelings of love: emotions that were all inextricably mixed up and which fought with one another in a hopeless lack of resolution. The precise memory of him became less vivid, as a drawing in pencil on paper may blur, become less clearly delineated with handling and folding. But he was still there, and every so often—more often than she would have liked to admit—there came a pang of longing. At such times all she wanted was for him to come back into her life as if nothing had happened, for her to be lying in his arms listening to the song that he liked to play at such moments, the gravelly voiced singer with his mid-Atlantic drawl singing about love and heartache; music that she could not listen to now, because of its associations and the sense of loss that it triggered. We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, our favourite, and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.

Yesterday, and the day before, she had not thought of John Liamor—not once. And she had not thought about him today, either, until that moment when in front of the lawyer’s office in Rutland Square she had thought about his absence from her thoughts. And it was different, she decided. When she thought about him now, he was just another person, not John Liamor, the man who had dominated her life. He was my North, my South—those desolate words of WHA about lost love. And he 1 0 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h went on to say: I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. Well, of course.

I am free of him now, she said to herself. I am a free woman.

I thought that he would last for ever: I was wrong. She went up to the door and pushed it open, thinking: I am free. But then she thought: Why am I free? And she knew intuitively that it was because of what had happened with Jamie. Something had been changed by that moment of contact. Jamie would be her lover. It was John who had been stopping her—not some notion of appropriateness—those were intellectual doubts and it was really far more simple than that. She had been tied to an incu-bus, the memory of a love that had been rejected and had had nowhere to go; she had been locked into a dead relationship and now the last dried skin of it had fallen away, like the scab on a wound, and she was free.

She faced the receptionist, who looked up at her with an enquiring smile. Isabel thought: What if I told this woman, if I said to her, “I have just decided, out there on your doorstep, that I am going to have an affair with a younger man?” And then, presto, had taken a photograph out of her bag and said, “There.

Look at him.”

We do not do these things, and she did not. She had once, in casual conversation about the mind, discussed such impulses with her psychiatrist friend, Richard Latcham, who had said:

“Of course we all have those thoughts. We have them when we stand on the edge of waterfalls. We all think: What if I jumped now? Or we think of saying something outrageous, or taking all our clothes off. It’s entirely natural, but we never do it. It’s the mind exploring possibilities, which is what our subconscious minds do all the time. Most of the possibilities are very straight-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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forward likelihoods, but there are others, which are set aside and disregarded. Don’t worry, Isabel.”

“But surely it happens,” Isabel had said. “Surely sometimes people give in to these urges. After all, some people actually do jump over waterfalls, and maybe not all of them had thought it all out beforehand.”

Richard thought for a moment. “I think it’s pretty rare,” he said. “But I do know of one case. Somebody I know, in fact. He told me all about it. He’s a classicist here in Cambridge, a tremendously erudite man. He writes about late Latin poetry.

Apparently he’s the man for late Latin poetry. They had a dinner in his college and they were all in the senior common room afterwards—you know, one of those old panelled rooms with portraits of the founder and Isaac Newton and so forth on the walls, and he was sitting with a friend drinking a glass of port when a visiting professor of archaeology from Canada walked past with his wife. They had just helped themselves to coffee and had the cups in their hands. Apparently she was a rather substantial woman who was particularly broad in the beam. And this classicist suddenly said very loudly, in the hearing of everybody, ‘My God! What a massive rump!’ ”

“Apparently this poor professor of archaeology dropped his coffee cup and the coffee spilled down the front of his trousers.

And his wife stood frozen to the spot. That was it. The classicist apologised and said that he did not know what had come over him. He really felt terrible about it. He later wrote them a letter and offered to make a substantial donation to a charity or cause of their choice. They accepted his apology, which is exactly what you would expect of decent people like the Canadians, and then they suggested some association for Anglo-Canadian 1 0 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h understanding, which I suppose was appropriate, in a way. But I think that was one case where the inner urge to do something impermissible overcame the inhibitory mechanisms.” Richard paused. “Mind you, it could have been worse.”

“Hardly,” said Isabel.

“He could have been standing at the edge of a waterfall,”

said Richard thoughtfully. “Or he could have been standing behind her at a waterfall.”

“And pushed her over?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Richard.

“What a—” She was about to say terrible disaster, but Richard said: “Splash.”