The Right Attitude to Rain

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Mimi looked enquiringly at Isabel, the edge of the summer house reflected in the lens of her glasses.

“Brother Fox?”

“Our urban fox,” said Isabel. “We call him Brother Fox because . . . well, I suppose it’s because he has to have a name and Grace and I feel that we know him quite well. So it’s Brother Fox.”

“St. Francis . . .”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “There is a Franciscan ring to it. Brother Sun, wasn’t it? And why not?”

“No reason at all,” said Mimi. “One of my favourite saints.

You know that picture, do you, the one in Florence, where the saint stands with his arms out and all the birds are at his feet—

those strange, naively painted birds, like little feathered boxes.”

She paused. “I’d like to see him, this Brother Fox of yours. Will he make an appearance?”

Isabel looked about the garden. “There’s something unpredictable about him. Sometimes, though, I feel as if he’s watching me. I just get that feeling.”

“And he is? He is really watching you?”

Isabel knew it sounded unlikely, but it was true. “Yes. It’s happened time and time again. I might be in my study, working, and I feel that there are eyes on me—eyes outside. And if I look up I see Brother Fox out in the garden, or see a flash of gold, which is him. He’s very beautiful, you see. Reddish-gold. A most beautiful creature.”

Isabel reached out and touched one of the flowers on the azalea bush. Nature was so beguiling in many of its corners; it was the tiny details that were important: the colour of these azaleas, somewhere between pink and red; the red-gold of fox fur. Why should we alone find the world beautiful? Or did 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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Brother Fox appreciate what he saw about him, and love it, as we did? No, we should not make the mistake of anthropomor-phism: the world for him was really not much more than a struggle for food, for life; a matter of genetic survival against all the competing genes; just struggle. And we were the enemy, with our dogs and our gas and our huntsmen with rifles; all terror and pain for foxes. But Brother Fox was not scared of her; he was wary, when he watched, but not scared.

The azalea was next to a mahonia bush, with its yellow flowers and those spiky leaves, so different from the azalea. Isabel’s hand moved on to touch the mahonia; it reminded her of holly, but it was more beautiful.

“I occasionally dream of Brother Fox,” she said to Mimi. “In my dreams he can speak. It’s very strange, but not at all odd in the dream, you know. He speaks with a slightly high-pitched, rather refined Scottish voice, but once he spoke French, and that surprised me. He used subjunctives and I remembered thinking how remarkable it was that an animal should have the subjunctive.” She used the construction “have the subjunctive”

without thinking that it might have sounded strange to Mimi.

Scots said “I have the Gaelic” when they could speak Gaelic.

Mimi laughed. “And what did he say in these dreams?

Small talk?”

Isabel searched her memory. Dreams are lodged in a very short-term part of the memory, but she had committed these to more permanent storage because they had been so unusual.

Her last conversation with Brother Fox had been something about how we control our lives and how contingency plays a part in what we are. She remembered saying to him that he was a fox—and he had agreed— and that the pattern of his life was determined by that brute fact of biology. But then he had said, 1 6 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h And so is yours, and she had felt indignant that a fox should call into question her free will. Their conversation had ended in an atmosphere of polite distance, which Isabel regretted, as she had had a sense of the preciousness of speaking with a fox.

She told Mimi this, and Mimi said, “But he was right, wasn’t he? Or you were, rather. Conversations in our dreams are really conversations with ourselves, aren’t they? Have you ever thought of it that way?”

“No, but you’re right. Internal rhetoric—that’s what philosophers would call it.” A mahonia leaf pricked the tip of her finger, just slightly, but she said to herself: I must be careful of sharp things. Internal rhetoric. “But . . . but surely, we don’t have to agree with what is said by the people to whom we are talking in our dreams? Of course we may put words into their mouths—we are after all the director of our dreams—”

“And producer,” interjected Mimi.

“Yes, and producer. But what is said in the dream by other people may just be what we think those other people are likely to say. The fact that we write the lines for them doesn’t mean that we agree with the sentiments behind the lines, does it?”

Mimi felt that she needed time to think about this. Philosophy, she had always thought, was often just a matter of common sense; a matter of finding the words to describe what is, or, in some cases, what should be. What Isabel had just said might have sounded complicated, but in reality it was not. The play-wright, the novelist did not endorse what their characters said—

that seemed clear enough. But where did it all come from?

Every word of Shakespeare was, after all, Shakespeare; if something came from the mind of the writer, then it was there in that mind, even if only as a possibility. And surely the insights of psy-chology underlined the point that what we talked about was 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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