The Right Attitude to Rain

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h walked over the gravel towards the door. Isabel looked up at the house, which seemed much taller when one was right up against it like this. These Scottish houses were really towers, small castles, and they must have seemed impregnable to their attackers. Of course there was always the possibility of a siege; it was all very well being behind three feet of solid stone, but food had to be brought in from somewhere. And then there was fire, and disease, and all the other hazards of having something to defend in lawless times.

Tom appeared as they reached the front door. “I was watching you from one of those little slots in the wall,” he said. “Very useful, those. I can look all the way down the drive and see who’s coming up to lay siege to me.”

Isabel smiled at the joke, but then the thought came to her: What if the threat is already inside? Tom noticed how her expression changed suddenly, and he said, “Everything all right?”

“Yes,” said Isabel quickly. “Yes. It is.”

“Good,” said Tom. He glanced over his shoulder—they were standing in the hall, and he looked towards a back door. “There’s somebody who looks after us here. She comes with the house.

Mrs. Paterson. She’s made up your rooms and will show you to them.”

Mrs. Paterson appeared, emerging from the doorway behind Tom. She was a middle-aged woman with a broad, weather-beaten face—the sort of face, thought Isabel, that one doesn’t see in towns any more, where pallor reigns. She greeted Isabel and Jamie courteously in a Border accent and indicated for them to come upstairs.

They followed her into a corridor. “You’ve not been in this house before?” she asked.

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“I visited the garden once,” said Isabel. “Some years ago.

But not the house itself.”

“Oh, aye,” said Mrs. Paterson. “I remember that. An awful lot of folk came out from Peebles to see the gardens. They should open them again some time. But I think that people who rent the house don’t always like it. They want privacy—and who can blame them?”

“That’s reasonable enough,” said Isabel. “I’m not sure if I would want people traipsing through my garden, such as it is.”

Mrs. Paterson made a sound that seemed like agreement.

The corridor ran the length of the house, but because of the square shape of the house, it was not particularly long. Now they were at the end of it, outside a door of light, stripped pine, which Mrs. Paterson pushed open. “Your room,” she said to Isabel.

She went in. Jamie stayed outside.

“You can come in too,” said Mrs. Paterson, turning to Jamie.

“Your room is next door. Through here.” She pointed to an inter-connecting door.

Jamie came in, looking embarrassed, thought Isabel. She turned away. It was a large room, with painted wood wainscot-ing around the walls and two windows. The floor was wooden, with wide, old boards, and there were faded Oriental rugs here and there. An ancient wardrobe, oak and irregular, stood against a far wall and there was some sort of chest of drawers opposite it. On the walls there were small, dark oil paintings of inde-terminate country subjects: a hare at the edge of a field; stooks of wheat in a field; a winter landscape. There was a large double bed.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h need to make tea or coffee or anything, the kitchen’s off the hall you came in. You’ll find everything you need there, even if I’m not around. And there’s a bathroom two doors down the hall—

we passed it. The hot-water pipes make a noise, but there’s lots of hot water, all the time.” She turned, smiled briefly at Isabel, and then left.

Isabel put her case down on the floor. Jamie had taken his case through to his room and had reappeared at the doorway between the two rooms. Now he moved over to her window and looked out.

“There’s a rooks’ nest in that tree,” he said. “Look at them.”

Isabel glanced at the tree. “It looks as if we’re sharing a bathroom,” she said.

Jamie looked round. “Fine,” he said. He returned to the window. “We could be a hundred miles from Edinburgh out here. We could be in Argyll. It’s amazing. Forty-five minutes from town.”

She joined him at the window. She looked out. Behind the trees, the hill rose up sharply, green on the lower slopes and then, as the heather took over, purple and purple-red. Sub specie aeternitatis, she thought: In the context of eternity, this is nothing, as are all our human affairs. In the context of eternity, our anxieties, our doubts, are little things, of no significance. Or, as Herrick put it, rosebuds were there to be gathered, because really, she thought, there was no proof of life beyond this one; and all that mattered, therefore, was that happiness and love should have their chance, their brief chance, in this life, before annihilation and the nothingness to which we were all undoubtedly heading, even our sun, which was itself destined for collapse and extinction, signifying the end of the party for who-soever was left.

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But she knew, even as she thought this, that we cannot lead our lives as if nothing really mattered. Our concerns might be small things, but they loomed large to us. The crushing underfoot of an ants’ nest was nothing to us, but to the ants it was a cataclysmic disaster: the ruination of a city, the laying waste of a continent. There were worlds within worlds, and each will have within its confines values and meaning. It may not really matter to the world at large, thought Isabel, that I should feel happy rather than sad, but it matters to me, and the fact that it matters matters.