They were poor, in a genteel sort of way, and her friend had said that everything about the house—the furnishings, the carpets—
was threadbare and worn, growing old in shadow, faded with age. That, apparently, had changed, and a decorator from Edinburgh had splashed colour and renewed texture about the place.
Isabel wondered whether the soul would have been taken out of the house by money and the search for comfort. She could not imagine Angie roughing it, and nor, when he was asked, could Jamie.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s high maintenance, I think.”
“An expensive woman.”
“Yes,” he said. “You could say that. But he’s pretty well off, isn’t he? So that doesn’t matter.”
“And do you think she loves him?” asked Isabel.
Jamie looked out the window. They were now approaching the edge of town and the slopes of the Pentland Hills could be seen rising before them. Behind them, over the North Sea, there were clouds in the sky, and slanting squalls of rain; behind the Pentlands, though, the sky was light, glowing, as if with promise.
He fiddled with a button on his jacket. It was hanging on by a thread, and he had meant to sew it before he came, but ran 1 8 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out of time. “I haven’t given it any thought,” he said quietly.
“And I don’t think you should either.”
Isabel was quick to deny her interest. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to interfere.”
“Are you sure?” Jamie sounded dubious. He had witnessed Isabel’s interventions on more than one occasion, and if they had turned out well—or at least if they had not resulted in disaster—that was, he thought, owing in part to chance.
“All right,” she said. “I confess that I’m intrigued. And who wouldn’t be? A conspicuously wealthy, sophisticated man has a young fiancee with not a great deal of grey matter—well, one thinks about that.”
“It’s his business if he wants to take up with somebody like her,” said Jamie. “That’s what some men want.” He paused and looked at Isabel. “They’ll probably be blissfully happy.”
Isabel conceded that. They could be happy, with each getting from the relationship what each wanted. But what, she asked, if he were to find out that she was interested only in his money? Could he be happy in those circumstances?
“He might be,” said Jamie. “Presumably men like that have a pretty clear idea of what’s what. He might be able to see through her and still say to himself: Well, I don’t care if she doesn’t really love me, I’ve got an attractive young wife, and as long as she behaves herself . . .”
“Which she might not do,” said Isabel quickly. “What if she has an eye for other men?”
Jamie shrugged. “She’d be a fool.”
Isabel drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She wondered whether Jamie was one of those people who just could not understand the tides of passion; who thought that people calculated advantage and disadvantage in matters of the T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
1 8 1
heart—they did not; people behaved drunkenly, irrationally when it came to these things. Perhaps that was why Mary, Queen of Scots, married Darnley, against all her obvious interest? But she did not want to go into that. Already their discussion had developed an edge which was not right for a romantic trip into the country—if that was what this was going to be.
Suddenly she was aware of Jamie beside her, of his legs at an angle, of his right arm resting in a position where it almost touched her side, of the wind from the half-open side window in his hair, ruffling it; and the phrase
He said, suddenly, “Look at those sheep.”
She looked. They were heading now up the hill from Auchendinny, and on the right side of the road there were fields and woods falling away to a river. The sheep were clustered about a hopper into which a farmer was siphoning feed of some sort. Little drifts of powdered feed, dust from the sheep’s table, were being blown away by the wind.
“Their lunch,” she said. They both laughed; there was nothing funny about it, but it seemed to them that something significant had been shared. When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing, because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened? she wondered.
She remembered something. “You know, I came out here quite a few years ago, when the Soviet Union was still in business. Just. It was shortly before its end. There was a woman who was a philosopher who had been sent over here by the Academy 1 8 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of Sciences of the USSR, and I was asked to entertain her for a few days. Mostly she wanted to go shopping, because they had so little in their own shops and she needed things. But I brought her out here to Peebles, to have lunch, and she saw sheep in the fields and cried out, ‘Look at all those sheeps! Look at all those sheeps!’ Sheeps. That’s what she said, understandably enough.
And then she said, ‘Do you know, in my country, we have forgotten how to keep animals.’ ”
Jamie was quiet. “And she hadn’t seen . . .”
“She hadn’t seen anything like it,” said Isabel. “Apparently the Soviet countryside was pretty empty. Nobody on the collective farms kept animals. The bond between people and the land, between people and animals, had been broken.”