That, she thought, was even better. “Do you want me to cook?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll manage something.”
They finished their drinks in the bar and then walked down St. Stephen Street, back to Jamie’s flat.
“That flat round the corner,” Jamie said. “Have you decided?”
“I have,” said Isabel. “I shall buy it. Grace looked at it the other day and liked it very much. She also met our friend Florence. They hit it off. She’ll probably recruit her for her spiritualist meetings.”
“Florence is too rational,” said Jamie. “Still, it’s a happy ending.”
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“I suppose so. And there’s nothing wrong with happy end-ings, is there?”
“No,” said Jamie. “Except, perhaps, for that fact that they are rather rare.”
They passed a small antique shop on the way and Isabel paused in front of the window. “I knew the man who ran this shop,” she said. “He used to sit in a chair, right there, dressed in a black suit with a waistcoat and a rose in his lapel, and everybody who went in received a great welcome and a story. He had Scottish literature on those shelves over there, and all other writers, including English, were shelved under foreign literature. But he didn’t mean it unkindly. He was just making a point.”
Jamie pressed his nose against the glass. The chair was empty, the shop dusty. “A point about what?”
“About cultural assumptions,” said Isabel. Seeing the empty shop saddened her. There were pockets of character, of resist-ance, that held out against all the forces that would destroy local, small-scale things, even small-scale countries; little shops were on the front line, she thought.
“I don’t like shopping in great big shops,” she muttered.
Jamie looked at her in puzzlement. “Excuse me?”
She smiled, and drew him away from the window to continue down the street. “I don’t like the idea of little shops like that disappearing. That’s all. I like small things.”
“Convenience,” said Jamie. “Isn’t there something in convenience?”
“I suppose there is. But then . . .” She trailed off. Perhaps it was too late, and the logic of the large scale was unstoppable, but it all led to sameness and flatness, and who wanted that?
Francs had gone, marks had gone, the insanely inflated Italian 2 4 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h lira had gone; cars looked the same wherever you went, clothes too. All the colour, all the difference, was being drained out of life. And species were dying too; every day insects disappeared for ever, strange little lives that had been led for millennia in the undergrowth came to an end with the destruction of a last toe-hold of habitat. It seemed like a relentless return to barrenness, to unrelieved rock. She looked at Jamie and wondered whether he cared about this. Or did one need another fourteen years to understand, or even to feel, these things?
“I’m hungry,” said Jamie.
“Then let’s go,” said Isabel. She was about to slip her arm into his, but stopped herself. Could she do that, or would that embarrass him? The early days of any relationship raised questions of that sort, of course; the easy familiarities came later, and seemed natural then, but at this stage they could be awkward. And they were not officially a couple, in the sense that people did not necessarily know about it, and would he want them to know? They walked separately.
In his flat, Jamie took from Isabel the disc that he had given her and slipped it into the player. His kitchen, which ran off the living room, was small, and Isabel watched him as he prepared the meal: mozzarella and tomatoes, followed by pasta. He poured her wine and they raised their glasses to each other in a toast.
“To you,” she said. And Jamie replied, “To me,” and then laughed. “I mean, to you.”
“To me, one imagines,” said Isabel, “is the toast of the Ego-tists’ Club. What do you think?”
Jamie agreed. “I’m sure it is,” he said. “Their dinners, though, will be difficult occasions. Everybody will want to give an after-dinner speech.”
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“And they’ll all think that there are too many members,”
she said.
There was silence for a moment. Jamie picked up the bottle of dressing that he had prepared for the mozzarella and tomatoes and shook it so that the black of the balsamic vinegar suffused the olive oil.
Isabel fingered the stem of her glass. “Jamie,” she said. “Are you happy about this . . . about what has happened between us?
Are you sure that you’re all right with it?”
He looked at her intently and she thought,
“Of course I am,” he said. “Of course.”
“You would tell me if you weren’t?”
“I would tell you.”
“Promise?”
He moved his right hand in a quick crossing of the heart.
