believed in God or wanted to believe. That was probably true of many people in any congregation, of course: they were there not T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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because they believed but because they felt the need for religion, for something beyond themselves. So what did Jamie believe in, if anything? Did he think that he had a soul?
She watched him pick up his glass. He was looking at her, his eyes smiling. Of course he had a soul, she said to herself; that gentle, kind, loving part of him. That was there, and she could see it.
“We’ve had an invitation,” she said. And immediately she wondered why she had said this. She had not been thinking about it, and even if she had, she would not have thought about bringing it up right now. But it came out, unanticipated.
“Oh?”
She swallowed hard. She had just had a vision of love, or something to do with love, and she had to go on in that spirit.
“Cat has asked us to dinner.”
She watched him closely. Sometimes words can be seen, she thought; one sees them travelling through the air and reaching their target as if an invisible wave had moved through the room. Isabel remembered how, as a young woman, she had once gone to sit through a trial in the High Court. She had a friend who was a junior advocate in the trial and she wanted to see her in action. It had been dramatic; she had seen the jury return its verdict and the judge had shifted in his seat to face the accused.
Then he simply said, “Six years,” and she saw the man in the dock reel backwards as if he had been hit by an unseen hand, pushing him back.
Jamie put down his glass and looked at her. The light that had been in his eyes, the smile, was no longer there; it had been replaced by something flat, something guarded. “That’s kind of her,” he said. “When?”
“She didn’t say. It was a message, actually. She left it with Grace.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“I see.”
She toyed with her fork. “Do you want to go? We don’t have to.” She thought that Cat would understand; they had kept off the subject of Cat, by unspoken agreement, because they both knew it was a wound that should not be breathed into.
He did not reply for a moment. “I’m over her,” he said, but he did not look at Isabel as he spoke, and she knew it could not be true. If Cat meant nothing to him anymore, then he would have looked at her; Jamie always engaged with people directly, looked them in the eye. But not now.
Isabel stared at him. This hurt her. “I don’t think you are, Jamie. I really don’t think you are.”
Now he looked up at her. “No. You’re right.”
“So do you still love her?”
His voice was low. “Maybe I do. Maybe. You know how it is.”
“Of course. I was in love for years and years. Even after John had left me I still loved him, went on loving him, so foolishly, pointlessly. But we can’t help ourselves, can we?”
He suddenly pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.
Something—his glass of water—toppled and was spilled, and made a long dark stain down the leg of his jeans. He came round to her and crouched down. He put his arm about her. His voice sounded hoarse; that was from emotion, she thought.
“Don’t you think that it’s possible that we can . . . that we can end up loving lots of people? People we used to love, still love.
Them. But they’re just there in the background, and we get on with loving other people, people from our present rather than our past. Don’t you think that?”
She reached for his hand and pressed it. Blessedness: she could not believe her state of blessedness; this young man, with T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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all his beauty and gentleness, in her arms, hers. “Of course I believe that,” she said.
“So do we go, or not?”
“I think we should go. Cat and I are family. I don’t want her cut out of my life with you.”
He kissed her on the brow, then on the lips. “All right.”
T H E M A I L T H E N E X T DAY brought two manuscripts that Isabel knew were coming and which she had been looking forward to receiving, and she read these in preference to the items immediately below them in the pile, some of which looked like bills. The manuscripts were as interesting as she had hoped, and she started to write grateful letters to their authors. Both were solicited contributions to a special issue on the philosophy of taxation, a subject that proved to be considerably more thought-provoking than Isabel had imagined. Why should the wealthy pay more tax than the poor? They did, or at least they did in most systems, but on what grounds was this defensible?
Should taxation be used as a tool to redistribute wealth? She thought it should, and many others thought so as well, but it was not so clear that taxation was the most appropriate way to achieve that. Should governments perhaps be honest and say that they intended simply to confiscate assets over a certain level? She gave some thought to that, wondering how she would feel if the government started to take her capital away, beginning right now, appropriating her funds, turning them into military equipment and welfare payments and new roads, as governments tended to do. I don’t have a very strong right to have what I have, she thought. All of it comes to me
