The Right Attitude to Rain

to say that, even if it was abundantly clear that that was what Cynthia needed to do.

Later that evening, as she walked back with Joe and Mimi and she described the conversation to them, Mimi said, “You were right not to say anything more. Poor woman. He’s all she has, and that’s rather sad, isn’t it? People cling. It’s not the best way, but you can understand why they cling.”

Isabel felt chastened. The needs of others were not a matT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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ter to be treated lightly, even when they were unreasonable, as was the case with Cynthia. I should feel sympathy for her, she thought, not irritation. And yet one could not hold on to somebody beyond a natural point, and Patrick, surely, had reached that point where his mother should let him go to live his own life. This made her think of Jamie, of course.

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

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MIRANDA, the Australian whom she had met at the Stevenson party, telephoned at nine o’clock the following morning, reminding Isabel that she had offered to speak to Cat about a job. Isabel, immured in her morning room with her coffee and the Scotsman crossword, with Mimi seated opposite her reading The Times, was surprised that she should call so early and so soon after the offer was made. But she was not irritated, as one sometimes may be when a promise is called in. It was understandable that Miranda should call and remind her; finding a job was a major thing for her. Then there was her age—nineteen or twenty-one is impatient, or less patient, Isabel thought, than thirty or forty. Isabel agreed to speak to Cat that morning and to telephone her once she had found out whether Cat could offer her anything.

“I hope you don’t think I’m being pushy,” Miranda said.

“Calling straight away and all. But you did say . . .”

“I did,” said Isabel. “And I’ll do what I said I would do.”

Isabel thought that it would be easier to discuss this with Cat in person, so she went into Bruntsfield an hour or so later.

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Eddie was standing at the door of the delicatessen when she arrived. He turned to her distractedly and then spat out, “Somebody’s stolen coffee again.” Then he swore—a simple expletive, crude, dirty.

Isabel looked at Eddie. He was staring down the street, his lip quivering in anger, his face flushed, as if he had just come running from somewhere. There were times when he seemed on the brink of tears, from sheer injustice, Isabel had always thought, and from that ancient, unspecified hurt; now it was more immediate.

“Stolen coffee?”

Eddie turned to face her. “It happens all the time,” he said.

“They just go for it. It’s always packets of coffee. Nine times out of ten.”

Isabel looked down the street. It was that time in the morning when things were at their quietest: those going to work had caught their lumbering buses, and it was too early for the morning shoppers to come out. A man walked past with his dog, a small cairn terrier with a collar on which dog was written helpfully in studs; the man glanced at Isabel and then at Eddie and smiled. There was a woman with a heavy bag, and a couple of boys of fourteen or fifteen, loose-limbed, dressed in black jeans sinking to the ground and voluminous T-shirts, engaged in the tribal debate of teenagers. She saw no fleeing shoplifters.

She followed Eddie inside, and the air changed; the smell of coffee (a temptation perhaps to the thieves), of ripening cheeses; the dry, itchy notes of pulses and cereals. Isabel had always felt that this was the smell of real food—supermarkets smelled of chemicals and detergents and cellophane wrapping.

Eddie, normally laconic, was vocal. “I don’t know why they 1 6 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h go for it,” he said. “They stuff their pockets with that Kenyan blend with the nice picture on it. Then they run out of the shop.”

Isabel thought. She had been in charge of the delicatessen for a week not all that long ago, when Cat had gone to a wedding in Italy, and she had seen no signs of shoplifting. Had she missed it? She cast her mind back. She remembered stacking the coffee section, and she remembered packets with a picture.

She had assumed that everybody who came into the shop was honest, which was the general assumption that she made about others.

She looked at Eddie, who was busying himself with counting the packets of coffee on the shelf. He was still quivering with rage.

“I always assume that people are good,” said Isabel. “I’m naive, I suppose.”

“They aren’t,” muttered Eddie.

“I suppose I shouldn’t trust people,” Isabel went on.

“Don’t,” said Eddie. “Never.”

She moved to the newspaper rack. What had happened to Eddie before he came to work here—and Isabel had never found out what that was—must have destroyed his trust in people. He had confided in Cat, she believed, and Cat had kept the confidence, not revealing what Eddie had said to her. But Isabel knew that it was something dark, and she did not want to know the details. So although she did not want to arouse Eddie’s private demons, she did not feel she could let this denial of trust go answered.

She picked up a paper and went to stand beside Eddie. “You can’t say that about trust, Eddie. You have to trust somebody.”

The young man stopped in the act of counting, his hand 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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