The Right Attitude to Rain

Mimi was unconvinced. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m not sure that we want our parents to be human. We know that they are, of course, but it’s a special sort of knowledge—or I think it is. Like the knowledge that we’re not here on this earth for ever.

We know that, but we don’t think of it all the time, do we? We put it to the back of our minds.”

Isabel took a sip of her wine. Champagne had been on offer, but she had missed it for some reason. “Well, if we don’t want to know too much about our parents—or about their faults, rather—then maybe that’s because we see ourselves in what they did. We recognise their failings because they are our own failings too. Unacknowledged, perhaps.”

Mimi nodded. “That may be.”

Isabel decided that she would go on. She could talk to Mimi because she was family, but a friend too, and she had always felt that Mimi understood. But how could she put it? And would Mimi be shocked? She had to remind herself that there was nothing shocking about it. Not objectively, but talking to another person about what one felt at that most intimate level was an incursion into the private, whatever people said, however frank the climate of the day.

She turned and looked at Mimi, and saw herself again, for a moment, in the lenses of those oval glasses, as in a mirror. “I was surprised to hear that my mother had had an affair, but . . .

but that’s not all that unusual and people do. However, it was the fact that it was with a younger man, a far younger man.

That . . .”

Mimi smiled. “Shows good taste? A certain spirit?”

“That’s exactly what I’m on the verge of doing.” She had said 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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it, and it sounded ridiculous. To be on the verge of having an affair! Either one had an affair or one did not.

Isabel looked for signs of surprise in Mimi, but there were none. Mimi just looked at her, as if expecting her to say something else. “But I knew that,” she said. “Jamie. I assumed that.”

Now the surprise was Isabel’s. “I didn’t realise . . .”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Mimi, reaching out for Isabel’s forearm. “We never realise how transparent we are. But people know. It was obvious at that dinner party you gave.”

“You gave.”

“I gave,” acknowledged Mimi. “You can tell when somebody is in love with another person. There’s a conspiratorial look.

No, that’s not quite right. There’s a connivance. No, that’s not correct either. There’s something. Put it that way. There’s something.”

“And you saw that there was something?”

Mimi patted her gently on the arm. “I did.” She paused, looking directly at Isabel. Now, thought Isabel, now come the words of warning, of caution. Do you think that it’s . . . I don’t want to interfere, but . . . Instead, Mimi said, “Who wouldn’t? Or rather, who couldn’t?”

“I’m sorry?”

Mimi spoke clearly. “Who couldn’t be in love with him?

Certainly, if I were your age, which I’m not, and if I were single, which I’m not, I’d have no hesitation in falling for somebody like that.”

It was the third such reaction. Florence Macreadie had said much the same thing, and then Grace. Now it was Mimi’s turn.

Nobody, it seemed, saw a problem. Or did the problem exist only in her imagination?

Isabel was about to speak. She suddenly felt she wanted to 1 4 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tell Mimi about how she had agonised over her feelings for Jamie, and how it now seemed that it had all been unnecessary.

But before she could say anything Mimi said, “A young man like that, of course, turns heads. He’ll have people falling for him left, right and centre. Angie certainly did that evening. Did you see it?”

Isabel felt a sudden stab of anxiety. She had seen Angie talking to Jamie and it had been obvious that they were getting on well. And then there was the invitation for Jamie to join them at the house party. But she had not imagined that it was anything serious.

“They talked a lot, yes. But do you really think that there was more to it than that?”

Mimi laughed. “Oh yes, I do. She was devouring him with her eyes. Throughout the meal, she was hanging on his every word. Which made me think, I’m afraid.”

Isabel smiled. “But I thought that you had already done that bit of thinking. I thought that you had your doubts about Angie’s commitment to Tom.”

Mimi made a gesture of agreement. “Yes. But this confirmed my suspicions in that respect. A recently engaged woman doesn’t make eyes at a young man if she’s happy with her new fiance.” She paused and looked at Isabel, as if for confirmation.

“She doesn’t, does she? And you don’t need to be much of a psychologist to reach that conclusion.”