resting on the edge of the shelf. Isabel was aware of his breathing, which seemed to come more quickly than usual, as if he had been exerting himself. He did not look at her, but kept his gaze upon the packets of coffee in front of him.
“I don’t,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I just don’t.”
“Because of something that happened to you?” She had not meant to say that, but it had come out.
He did nothing, said nothing. Isabel quickly thought, I must get away from this topic.
“Anyway,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it. But remember that there are some people you can trust. Me. Cat. You can trust us, Eddie. And not everyone who comes into this shop is going to steal something. They really aren’t.”
She moved back to the newspaper rack and replaced the paper, since Cat had arrived, a shopping bag in her hand. Isabel greeted her, leaving Eddie to his thoughts. “We’ve had shoplifters,” she whispered. “Eddie’s very upset.”
Cat glanced at Eddie and sighed. With a nod of her head she signalled to Isabel to follow her into the office at the back.
“He gets really upset over that,” said Cat once they were out of Eddie’s earshot. “It’s one of the things that seems to trigger memories for him. He gets over it, of course, but I really feel for him when it happens.”
“He said something about not trusting anybody,” said Isabel.
Cat opened her shopping bag and took out a small container of nail polish, which she held against her nails to assess the colour match.
“He doesn’t,” said Cat. “Poor Eddie. He doesn’t trust anybody. Even himself.”
Isabel frowned. The idea of not trusting oneself was a strange one. It was possible to imagine not trusting anybody 1 6 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h else—bleak though such a position would be—but not to trust oneself? Did that make sense?
Cat put down the bottle of nail polish and looked up at Isabel. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what happens, I gather. People to whom really bad things happen don’t trust their own feelings.
Did they ask for it? Did they deserve it? Those sort of questions.
And that means they don’t trust themselves.”
Yes, thought Isabel, you’re right. And she remembered that when John Liamor had left her she had asked herself whether she had brought about his departure. For a time she had blamed herself for his womanising, for his constant affairs, and had felt, in some vague, unspecified way, that it was her failure to make him happy that had driven him into the arms of others. Such nonsense, of course, but she had believed it then.
Cat shrugged. “Leave him,” she said. “He’s getting a bit better—generally. Don’t talk to him about it.”
Isabel agreed. “But I do want to talk to you,” she said. “Are you still thinking of taking on somebody else?”
Cat said that she was. “There’s an Australian girl I met,”
Isabel said. “She’s looking for something. I get the impression that she’d be a very good worker. And she’s available pretty much immediately.”
Cat was interested. “Will she be all right with Eddie?” she asked. “You know how he’s frightened of people.”
Isabel did not know how to answer that question. She knew very little about Miranda, now that she came to think of it. All she knew was that she came from Australia and wanted to work.
But could she be trusted? Of course she could be, provided, of course, that one could trust somebody of whose past one knew nothing and of whose present one could not say much more than freckles, an engaging smile and an apparent optimism. PerT H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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haps that was a good enough basis for trust, even in a world in which people destroyed the fragile sense of self of young men like Eddie and thought, one assumed, nothing of it.
“She seems nice enough.” That poor, overworked word, she thought,
“I’ll try her now,” said Cat, taking the piece of paper on which Isabel had written Miranda’s telephone number.
Isabel left, pausing at Eddie’s side on the way out. The young man was standing disconsolately, staring out of the window, his gaze unfocused. She took his hand, which felt warm to her, and a bit damp. “We’re very fond of you, you know,” she whispered. “Cat. Me. We’re very fond of you.”
She gave his hand a squeeze and, after a moment, she felt him return the pressure, not very convincingly, but detectably nonetheless.
M I M I WA S I N T H E G A R D E N when Isabel returned to the house. Isabel went out to join her, having seen her from the kitchen window, standing beside a large clump of flowering azaleas near the small wooden summer house.
“Something been digging here,” said Mimi, pointing to the ground at her feet. “Look. A mole?”
Isabel looked down at the scratchings in the lawn. A few lines of dark earth had been scattered across a small area of grass and a bulb, dug from the edge of the flowerbed, had been left against a crenellation of mud. She looked for the familiar signs: a feather, perhaps; a fragment of bone from a vole or shrew, or even a chicken leg salvaged from kitchen pickings, but there was nothing.
“Brother Fox,” she said. “This is his territory.”
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