cornucopias. The picnickers, frozen in time, were dwarfed. “Could it not become a love affair?” she said quietly. She watched Isabel’s face as she spoke, and her words were hesitant, as if ready for withdrawal in the face of a hostile reaction. But Isabel was not offended by the question.
“It’s almost that,” she said. “I think we’re at a crossroads now. But I just don’t know.”
“But you should,” said Florence. “Look at yourself. You’re still quite young. You’re not my age. If he wants it too, then why deny yourselves?”
It’s not as simple as that, thought Isabel. There was the question of friendship and the hazardous conversion of friendship into erotic love. That was not always simple. “I can’t help myself,”
she said. “I keep thinking through the implications of things. I know that it’s a guaranteed way of never getting anything done, but it’s just the way I am. I don’t act spontaneously.”
“Then be prepared,” said Florence abruptly. “Be prepared to shed tears when you get to my age and you think back on lost opportunities. Somebody asked me to live with . . .”—there was the briefest hesitation, and then —“with her. I said no, because people would talk. They wouldn’t now, of course, but it was different then. They didn’t care about people’s happiness, did they? And I think that we would have been very happy together.
Just as friends, you know. Just as friends. She had a flat in the Dean Village, you know, under the bridge, looking out onto the mill pond. It would have been like living on an opera set. We would have been happy.”
“We shouldn’t care so much about disapproval,” said Isabel.
“But we do, don’t we?”
Florence was looking down at the floor. There was regret in T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
1 3 3
her expression. She looked up at Isabel. “Go on,” she said. “Go ahead. Have an affair with him.”
“And if it goes wrong?”
“That’s the last thing one thinks of on starting these things,”
said Florence. “Really, it must be. Otherwise . . .”
“Maybe.”
There was silence. Isabel had reached a decision, but she did not want to tell Florence what it was. The conversation had been an intimate one, with revelations on both sides, and she had a natural caution. She had not come here to talk about herself and her feelings and she had been slightly surprised by the way in which the other woman had encouraged her. Was it just because she had a romantic streak? There were people who were forever trying to bring others together; it appealed to them to have the world paired off, as if this brought resolution of some sort. But she did not imagine that Florence would think that way. In which case, was she obtaining some almost voyeuristic pleasure from encouraging the affair? Again, some people derived something of that nature from the contemplation of the affairs of others, which was not surprising, thought Isabel, because much of our lives are spent in thinking about what others are doing, watching them, emulating them.
“I really must go,” she said, rising to her feet.
Florence did not get up. “I’ve offended you, haven’t I?” she said. “This is none of my business.”
Isabel shook her head in denial. “You haven’t offended me at all. You’ve made me think. That’s all.”
As she made her way down the stone staircase to the front door, Isabel encountered the cat she had seen on her first visit to Florence’s flat. He was sitting on a chair on a landing, his tail hanging down beneath the seat. He watched her warily as she 1 3 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h walked past, looking up at her, holding her gaze for a moment, before he turned his head away to stare at the banisters with affected interest in something invisible to a human being. Then he closed his eyes, as if to dismiss her, and she walked quietly on. Many people in pursuit of the cool, thought Isabel, would give anything to appear as indifferent, as insouciant, as this indo-lent cat, but they would never make it. Wrong species: we are too engaged, too susceptible to emotion, too far from the con- summate psychopathy of cats.
C H A P T E R T W E L V E
E
THE WEEKEND with Tom and Angie was still some days away. Isabel was looking forward to getting out of town—she had not been anywhere that summer, because June, and the better weather it brought, had crept up on her unannounced.
She wanted to go to Italy for a couple of weeks, or to Istanbul, but had done nothing about organising a trip. Perhaps September or October would be better, when the heat had abated and there would be fewer people about, and perhaps . . . No, Jamie would not be able to come then, as it was term-time, and there would be his bassoon pupils to think about. So perhaps she should suggest just a short trip, a three-day weekend, to one of the Scottish islands, to Harris, perhaps, to that landscape of grass and granite outcrops and Atlantic skies. Jamie might fish on one of the lochs, and she would walk out along that strip of land where the sea broke in waves of cold green water and where one could just imagine those early Scottish saints, their skirts wet, coming in on their small boats from Ireland.
But there was no point in thinking about that now. She had to contend with the preparation of the next issue of the journal and with a number of objections raised to her editing by one of 1 3 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h her contributors. He was a professor of moral philosophy from Germany who prided himself on his ability to write in English.
This pride was well placed in some respects, but not in others.
Isabel had tried to tell him that inversions in English had to be handled carefully—otherwise infelicities of style would we encounter. The verb at the end of the sentence could be put, but only rarely.
