The Right Attitude to Rain

“Very little,” said Mimi. “And that’s what makes them such fun.”

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

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THAT FRIDAY was the day on which they were due to go off to stay with Tom and Angie. Joe and Mimi left in the morning, as they planned to visit Traquair House beforehand. Traquair, the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, had a maze (“Joe will get lost, so we won’t be doing that,” said Mimi) and a library (“Joe will spend the whole visit there”) and the cradle in which James VI slept as an infant, a carved rocking cradle in which the future king had been laid by his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.

“I feel so sorry for her,” said Mimi. “What a difficult country this must have been. All that plotting and intrigue.”

Isabel was sympathetic—up to a point. It was unfortunate having one’s head chopped off by a scheming, suspicious cousin, certainly, but Mary had been no stranger to intrigue.

“She did a fair amount of scheming herself,” she observed. “And then there were those men . . .”

It was a non sequitur, she knew, but it seemed to add to the picture of misfortune. Mimi, though, was not going to let that pass. “But she never really had much choice,” she said. “How old was she when she married the Dauphin? Fifteen, wasn’t it?

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And she’d been betrothed to him at the age of six or something like that. Today we’d call that child abuse.”

“The Dauphin wasn’t the problem, of course. That was just sad. It was the subsequent husbands.”

Mimi raised a finger. She used to be able to quote several lines of the poem that Mary wrote on the death of Francis but now it was gone. Poetry went; no matter how fervently one wished it would stay, it went. She closed her eyes. By day, by night, I think of him—that came into it. He had doted on her, that little boy, and she had loved him in return, but rather as a sister would love her little brother, the child groom with his child bride. Her elegy to him had the drum-beat of real grief in its lines.

“And Darnley,” said Isabel.

Mimi sighed. “You know, it always surprises me. People say that they can’t understand why she chose to get mixed up with Darnley. But surely it’s obvious. Or at least I think it is. Darnley was handsome, and he was the only man around who was taller than she was. He was also fond of a party.”

“I would have thought those provided good enough reason.

Women like handsome men who are fun. And then, a little bit later, they realise their mistake.”

“Exactly,” said Mimi. “Getting involved with anyone for their looks alone is folly. Sheer folly.”

“And yet people do it, don’t they? It’s another example of human frailty, I suppose.” Isabel thought: If Jamie did not look like he did, would I feel the way I do about him? What if Jamie were short, or overweight, or had an unflattering profile? Would I love him? These thoughts unsettled her. John Liamor had been good-looking—and had made use of the fact. He had that 1 7 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dark hair that the Irish can carry off so well, and chiselled features and, of course, I loved him for that. Of course I did. She remembered the poem that Yeats had written to Anne Gregory about how only God would love somebody for herself and not her yellow hair.

She knew that she would not feel the way she did about Jamie if he were not good-looking. And that, she thought, was a dispiriting conclusion, for it meant that it was really a love of beauty that was at work; we love the beautiful, and we find it in a person. The affection one feels for a person—that familiar, solid loyalty that grows around those to whom we have become accustomed, or on whom we have come to depend—is different from love, or at least from romantic love. It was a compromise; the ersatz coffee that we drink when the real is unobtainable.

Mimi brought an end to these thoughts. “Whatever miscalculations she made,” she said, “Mary was a brave woman. Have you read her last letter, the one that she sent to Henry III? I find it terribly moving, that letter.”

Isabel had, and recalled the dignity of the sentences in which she describes the shabby behaviour of those who had secured her execution; of how they had kept from the Queen of Scots her chaplain, so that he could not come to hear her confession and give her the comfort of the last sacrament. And how she sent to Henry two precious stones as talismans against illness; and the awful finality of the sentence, Wednesday, at two in the morning. It was almost unbearable, just to read, but worse was to come in the letter which Robert Wynkfielde wrote about the execution: a testament to her bravery and dignity, as well as to the loyalty of dogs; for Mary’s little dog was found to be hiding in her skirts, unwilling to leave the body of its mistress, and had had to be washed of the Queen’s blood. And that, thought 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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Isabel, was how it all ended in Scotland. We had a stirring history, which people romanticised, but at the end of the day it ended in blood.

She might take Mimi, she thought, to visit her friend Rosalind Marshall, who had written about Scottish queens. They had spoken about Darnley together in the supermarket in Morningside, of all places, when Isabel, who had been reading his biography at the time, had asked Rosalind’s opinion.

“We must remember how young he was,” said Rosalind.

“That explains a lot, you know. These days a young man like that would be going to clubs and bars.”

“Instead of marrying Mary, Queen of Scots,” mused Isabel.

“Precisely,” said Rosalind, reaching for a packet of Arbo-rio rice.

After Joe and Mimi had left for Traquair, Isabel spent several hours working in her study. Grace was in the house, but they had not spoken much that morning, as Grace had been in one of her moods. Sometimes Isabel would enquire as to the reason for the mood, and would receive a diatribe on some issue, but usually she tactfully waited for the indignation or outrage to subside. This morning she suspected that it was political, as it had been a