The Right Attitude to Rain

quite simply, a lie, and one could not lie.

“Yes, he was. Jamie was there.” She left it at that. She was not obliged to account to Cat, even if Jamie had once been her boyfriend. Cat had rejected him and made it very clear that she had no intention of taking him back. In the circumstances, then, she could hardly complain if Jamie became involved with somebody else. But then, that somebody else was Cat’s aunt.

“Isabel,” whispered Cat, “I can’t believe that you would do it. That you would go off with Jamie. He was my boyfriend, for God’s sake. Mine. I knew that you saw him, but I fondly imagined that it was just a nice little friendship—not this.”

Isabel sighed. “I’m sorry, Cat. I really am. It was just a 2 2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h friendship to begin with—I promise you that. I had no idea that you would be jealous of him. You knew that Jamie was head over heels in love with you. You knew that. But you’re the one who got rid of him and you shouldn’t really be jealous of him. That’s hardly fair, is it? To him or anybody else for that matter.”

Cat gave Isabel a look which disturbed her greatly. If it was not quite hate, it was close to it. “Jealous? Jealous?” She spat out the words. “I am not in the slightest bit jealous.”

Isabel spoke calmly. “You must be. Otherwise you wouldn’t behave like this.”

“It is not jealousy,” said Cat. “It’s disgust.”

Isabel was silent. Miranda and Eddie, from the other side of the room, had picked up that an argument was in progress and were looking in their direction with curiosity. She averted her gaze. Suddenly she felt ashamed. Disgust. That was what Cat felt about her conduct. Her own niece felt that.

“Think about it,” Cat went on. “He’s twenty-eight and you’re forty-two. You could be his mother.”

Isabel looked up. “Hardly,” she said. “I was fourteen when he was born.”

“So what?” Cat said abruptly. “He’s much younger than you are. Much. And anyway, don’t you think that there’s something a bit disgusting in an aunt taking her niece’s boyfriend into her bed? Or did you climb into his bed? Did you? Is that what happened?”

“You have no right to talk to me like that. You don’t know what you’re saying, Cat.”

Cat sat back in her chair. The anger now seemed to drain out of her expression and Isabel noticed that there were tears welling in her eyes.

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“Cat,” she said, reaching out to her. “Please don’t be upset.

Please.”

“Go away,” said Cat. “Just go away.”

Isabel reached for the shopping bag that she had placed on the floor below the table. Cat kicked it, and the bag fell over, spilling the contents on the floor.

Eddie watched from the counter. Then, when Cat rose to her feet and went silently into her office, he walked over to Isabel’s table and bent down to retrieve the items that had fallen out of the bag.

“She sometimes gets into a bad temper,” he whispered to Isabel. “Usually it’s when her boyfriend is being difficult. She gets over it.”

Isabel tried to smile as she thanked Eddie, but it was difficult. What had she done? When she had entered the delicatessen that morning she had still been feeling elated over Jamie. Now that had changed. She simply had not thought about the impact her affair with Jamie might have on Cat. It was remiss of her; she spent so much time thinking about other things, about the moral ramifications of every act, that when it came to something so close to her, something as important as her relationship with Cat, how could she not even have thought about the implications?

But then she thought: Why should I feel guilty? I should feel elated, not guilty; elated that I have the affection of somebody like Jamie; elated that I have been the recipient of such an unexpected gift. That is how she should have felt, but did not.

Guilt over Cat put a stop to it.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

E

ISABEL?”

She had answered the telephone in her study. In front of her, a particularly impenetrable—and dull—manuscript bore the markings of her blue pencil. “The Ethics of Tactical Voting”

was not easy reading. Was it acceptable to vote for somebody you did not like in order to prevent somebody else from winning an election? Of course it was, thought Isabel, because in those particular circumstances you did like the person for whom you voted; you liked him more than you liked the opposition. So the fundamental premise that you were indicating approval where you really felt disapproval was false: that was not what your vote meant. Normally, this paper would have been rejected, but it had been written by a member of the editorial board and comity had to be borne in mind. The telephone call was a welcome diversion, and indeed Isabel had been on the point of getting up to make a cup of tea—her third that morning—in order to give herself an excuse to stop reading. She was also distracted, of course, by the row with Cat. That had been terrible, and she had tried to put it out of her mind, but it was there nonetheless, a background feeling of dread. And Jamie had not telephoned.

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She had dared to hope that it would be Jamie, but she recognised Tom’s voice. “I’ve been meaning to call you to say thank you,” she said. “That was a wonderful weekend.”

He said that the pleasure was entirely his—and Angie’s of course—which Isabel doubted, as she was certain Angie would have been just as happy, or happier perhaps, had she not been there. There was a silence after this,