the meeting.
He decided to confide in Isabel. “I feel a bit jumpy about this,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just have these butterflies in my stomach.”
Isabel tried to reassure him. “The best way to deal with an old flame is to treat him or her as an old friend, or a cousin, maybe.”
He thought about this for a moment. “That’s all very well, but I don’t feel like this when I’m going to see an old friend. This is a different feeling.”
“Just don’t worry,” she said. “Just stop thinking about it.”
She reached out and took his hand. “Look, why don’t we go downstairs and have something before we go? A . . . gin and tonic.”
“For Dutch courage?”
“Yes,” she said. “Although I must say that that expression has always seemed to me to be a bit unkind.”
“Are the Dutch naturally brave?”
“I suspect that they’re the same as anybody else. Some are brave, some aren’t. But it’s got nothing to do with the Dutch themselves. It’s the gin they made.” She squeezed his hand.
“Don’t let Cat intimidate you.”
“Why has she asked us?” he asked. “Why?”
Isabel could not answer the question, and did not try to.
They went downstairs and into the drawing room, where she started to prepare the drinks while Jamie went into the morning room to speak to Grace. When he came back he said, “I’m going to call a taxi for Grace. She has a migraine coming on.”
Grace was prone to the occasional migraine, and would need to go to bed for twenty-four hours to ward it off. Isabel 1 1 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h handed the preparation of the drinks over to Jamie. “You do this,” she said. “I’ll phone for a taxi and get her organised.”
“Will we call off?” Jamie said. There was no disappointment in his voice.
Isabel, halfway out the door, gave him a look of mock surprise. “Why? Charlie can come in his carry-cot.” And why shouldn’t he? she thought. Cat could no longer pretend that Charlie did not exist; she had been cool towards him, barely acknowledging him, but that could not go on.
Grace kept a migraine pill at the house. She had taken it, and was feeling slightly better, but Isabel insisted that she should go home and bundled her into a taxi. Then she returned to the drawing room, where Jamie handed her her glass.
She raised it to him and took a sip. “Strong,” she said, making a face.
Jamie grinned. “We’ve got a long evening ahead of us.”
There was a frisson to the drinking of a strong gin and tonic, but Isabel felt that she needed this. Jamie felt the same, and by the time he had drained his glass he felt more confident about the encounter with Cat; but that feeling still lingered, that anticipation, which he realised now was sexual excitement. He looked away from Isabel, as if she might see it in his eyes.
CAT H A D R E C E N T LY moved to a flat in Fettes Row. It was on the third floor of a Georgian block, reached by a winding common stair that connected the landings of each flat. They had travelled across town by taxi, with Charlie obligingly asleep in his carry-cot on the floor of the cab, and now Jamie was carrying him up the last few steps to Cat’s door. Isabel, standing behind 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
1 1 9
Jamie, bent down and looked at her son. “How can she dislike him?” she muttered.
Jamie reacted sharply. “Who?” he asked. “Who dislikes him?”
Having kept off the subject of Cat with Jamie, Isabel had never mentioned to him the animosity that she had picked up in Cat’s reaction to Charlie; and she had not intended to do so now. Her muttered words, thoughts inadvertently expressed aloud, had not been meant for his ears, but they would not be easily retracted now. But she tried nonetheless.
“I don’t know if she does,” she said apologetically. “I sense something in her attitude, but perhaps I shouldn’t go so far as to say that she dislikes him.”
Jamie frowned. He cast a glance down the stairs. “We could go home, you know,” he said, in a lowered voice. “We have a perfectly reasonable excuse, with Charlie. Babies and dinner parties don’t mix.”
Isabel thought that she saw anger in him, which surprised her. Jamie was normally of a markedly affable temperament, but this appeared to have riled him. Of course he was a father, she reminded herself, and any parent, especially a newly besotted one, resents the thought that somebody else might find fault with his child; our children are perfect, especially when they have just arrived and not disclosed their hand. But she and Jamie had come this far, and she thought it likely that Cat had even heard the front door being opened and the sound of their coming upstairs. For a few moments Isabel imagined how it would be to leave now, to begin sneaking downstairs again, and then for Cat to open the door and look down at their retreat-ing heads. A hostess might have cause to reflect on such a scene and to wonder why it was that her guests should feel compelled to leave before arriving, but would Cat do that? Isabel thought 1 2 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h not, and nor, to be honest, would she do so herself: the light from such incidents rarely fell on ourselves and our faults.
A tall, slender young woman opened the door. Her eyes went to Isabel first, then to Charlie, and finally to Jamie, where they lingered. Isabel glanced at Jamie, who, if he had looked at the young woman to begin with, had now looked away. Our eyes give us away, she thought; they move to the beautiful, to the attractive; they slide off
