There had been acceptance, later, and reconciliation, but by that stage Isabel had announced her pregnancy and Cat had retreated in a mixture of resentment and embarrassment.
“You disapprove,” said Isabel. “Obviously.”
Cat had looked at her with an expression that Isabel found impossible to interpret.
“I know he was your boyfriend,” Isabel continued. “But you did get rid of him. And I didn’t set out to become pregnant.
Believe me, I didn’t. But now that I am, well, why shouldn’t I have a child?”
Cat said nothing, and Isabel realised that what she was witnessing was pure envy; unspoken, inexpressible. Envy makes us hate what we ourselves want, she reminded herself. We hate it because we can’t have it.
By the time that Charlie arrived, tumbling—or so it felt to Isabel—into the world under the bright lights of the Royal Infir-mary, Cat was talking to Isabel again. But she did not show much warmth towards Charlie; she did not offer to hold him 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
7
or to kiss him, although he was her cousin. Isabel was hurt by this, but decided that the best thing to do was not to flaunt Charlie before her niece, but allow her to come round in her own time.
“You can’t carry on disliking a baby for long,” said Grace, who, imbued with folk wisdom, was often right about these things. “Babies have a way of dealing with indifference. Give Cat time.”
Time. She looked at her watch. She had put Charlie down for his nap almost two hours ago and he would be waking up shortly. He would want feeding then, and although Grace could cope with that, Isabel liked to do it herself. She had stopped breast-feeding him only a few days after his birth, which had made her feel bad, but the discomfort had been too great and she had found herself dreading the experience. That was not a way to bond with one’s child, she thought; babies can pick up the physical tension in the mother, the drawing back from contact. So she had switched to a baby formula.
Isabel would not leave the delicatessen without exchanging a few words with Cat, no matter how strained relations might be. Now she rose from her table and made her way to the half-open door to the office. Eddie, standing at the counter, glanced briefly in her direction and then looked away again.
“Are you busy?”
Cat had a brochure in front of her, her pen poised above what looked like a picture of a jar of honey.
“Do people buy lots of honey?” Isabel asked. It was a banal question—of course people bought honey—but she needed something to break the ice.
Cat nodded. “They do,” she said, distantly. “Do you want some? I’ve got a sample somewhere here. They sent me a jar of heather honey from the Borders.”
8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“Grace would,” said Isabel. “She eats a lot of honey.”
There was a silence. Cat stared at the photograph of the jar of honey. Isabel drew in her breath; this could not be allowed to go on. Cat might come round in the end—and Isabel knew that she would—but it could take months; months of tension and silences.
“Look, Cat,” she said, “I don’t think that we should let this go on much longer. You’re freezing me out, you know.”
Cat continued to stare fixedly at the honey. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“But you do,” said Isabel. “Of course you know what I mean.
And all that I’m saying is that it’s ridiculous. You have to forgive me. You have to forgive me for having Charlie. For Jamie. For everything.”
She was not sure why she should be asking her niece’s forgiveness, but she was. When it came to forgiveness, of course, it did not matter whether somebody was wronged or not—
what counted was whether they felt wronged. That was quite different.
“I don’t have to forgive you,” said Cat. “You haven’t done anything wrong, have you? All you’ve done is have a baby. By my . . .” She trailed off.
Isabel was astonished. “By your what?” she asked. “Your boyfriend? Is that what you’re saying?”
Cat rose to her feet. “Let’s not fight,” she said flatly. “Let’s just forget it.”
If this had been said with warmth, then Isabel would have been comforted by these words, and relieved. But they were said without passion, and she realised that this was far from a rapprochement; this was a mere changing of the subject. She wanted to protest, to take Cat in her arms and beg her to stop 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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this, but a barrier of animosity, one of those invisible clouds of feeling, stood between them. She turned away. “Will you come round to the house sometime?” she asked. “Come and see us.”
She left Cat’s office. Outside, from behind the counter, Eddie looked up and exchanged glances with Isabel. For a young man who everybody imagined understood nothing, he understood everything, thought Isabel.
“HE WAS YELLING his head off,” Grace said. “So I gave him his feed. And since then he’s been perfectly happy. Look.”
Grace had been cradling Charlie in her arms and now handed him over to Isabel in the hall.
