The Right Attitude to Rain

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h eating. He took her hand. “You can do no wrong, you know,” he said. “Not in my eyes.”

“What a funny thing to say. But very nice.”

“I mean it.”

She felt the pressure of his fingers on the palm of her hand.

It was gentle, as everything about him was. Gentle. Love is not a virtue, she thought; not in itself. But it helps us to be virtuous, to do good for those whom we love, and in that sense it can never be wrong, wherever it alights, whatever direction it takes.

She looked at Jamie, in fondness. But she found herself thinking: He said that he had lied to Angie when he told her he had a girlfriend. Therefore I am not his girlfriend. So what does that make me?

He let go of her hand and returned to his meal.

“Can we go away together?” he asked. “Somewhere on the west coast? Or one of the islands?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’d like to go to Harris,” he said. “Have you ever been to the Outer Hebrides?”

“Yes,” she answered. “And there’s a hotel I know there, just a small one, a converted manse. It looks down on a field that is full of wild flowers in the spring and summer, with the sea just beyond. Cold, green waves. The very edge of Scotland. It’s very beautiful. We could go there. Would you like that?”

“Very much.”

She smiled at him, and put her hand to his cheek, as she had done before, on that first discovery. But as she did so, she thought: I am going to break my heart over this, but not now, not just yet.

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

E

HAPPINESS. Over the next few days, Isabel felt herself to be in state of blessedness. She spoke to Jamie every day, and saw him briefly, for a snatched lunch in the small cafe opposite the gate of the Academy; he had an hour between pupils and they talked, low-voiced because a couple of the boys from the school were sitting at a nearby table, sniggering. Isabel eventually smiled at them and they blushed scarlet and turned away.

Isabel’s happiness, though, was qualified by her anxiety over Cat. There had been rows with Cat before, and they always resolved themselves after a few days. The normal pattern would be for Isabel to apologise, whether or not she was in the wrong, and for Cat, grudgingly, to accept the apology. Isabel thought that she might wait a little longer before she went to speak to her niece; that would give Cat time to simmer down and also, she hoped, to begin to feel guilty about her own behaviour. This time it really was not her fault, she thought. Cat had no right to Jamie, having rejected him and turned a deaf ear to his attempts to persuade her to take him back, and even if Isabel had perhaps been insensitive to the need to talk to her about her feelings for Jamie, she considered this to be a light offence.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She made her way to the delicatessen in the late morning.

She had written a note which she would leave for Cat—a note in which she confessed her lack of sensitivity and asked Cat to forgive her. I’ve been thoughtless, she wrote. But then, in self-defence, It may be hard for you—I understand that—but please let me be happy. I had not imagined that this would happen.

Please give me your blessing. She had read and reread the note, agonising over the wording, but had eventually decided that the words were just right because they were true.

Cat was not there. Miranda and Eddie were behind the counter, Eddie cleaning the slicer—Isabel’s blood ran cold even at that—and Miranda serving a customer. Both of them glanced at her; Miranda smiled and Eddie acknowledged her with a slight nod.

“Cat?” she asked Eddie.

“Out,” he said. And then added, “Patrick.”

Isabel sighed. Even if Patrick was as busy as his mother suggested, he still seemed to have a lot of time for lunch with Cat.

She wondered whether his mother knew about these trysts, and whether, if she did, she would try to interfere.

She asked Eddie to pour her a cup of coffee. Then she picked up a newspaper and went to sit at one of the tables. The world was in chaos, the front page suggested: floods had destroyed a large part of somebody’s coast, and there were pictures of a couple stranded up a tree, the woman wailing, her skirts torn and muddied; there were people building nuclear weapons; a large lake somewhere had been found to be poisoned, dead. So we frighten ourselves daily, thought Isabel, and with reason.

She folded the newspaper up and put it away. She would look out at the street, watching passers-by, and then, if Cat had not returned in twenty minutes, leave the note. She stared 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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through the window, past the carefully arranged display of bottles of olive oil which Eddie had set up to lure customers inside.

Eddie was in charge of the window displays, and looked forward to the beginning of each week, when he would rearrange them.

He brought Isabel her coffee and sat down opposite her, his cleaning cloth draped casually over his shoulder. “I heard your news,” he said, grinning as he spoke. “Congratulations.”

Isabel sipped at the scalding, milky coffee. She had not anticipated this; Cat must have told him. “She told you?