the others; they flash out our emotional signals as clearly as if they were Aldis lamps. Jamie seemed irritated, almost flustered. We have barely arrived, Isabel thought, and the evening’s becoming difficult.
The young woman gestured for them to enter. “I’m Claudia,” she said. “Cat’s flatmate.”
“Of course.” Isabel had heard that Cat had taken a flatmate when she moved into Fettes Row, but she knew nothing about her other than that she came from St. Andrews and that she played golf, which almost everyone in St. Andrews did. This information had come from Eddie, who had met Claudia when she came into the delicatessen. He had curled his lip around the word
“Get their kicks from whacking a little white ball around,”
he said. “Yes, sure.”
“Each of us has something,” she said. She felt inclined to ask Eddie how he spent his spare time, but hesitated. Eddie was more confident now, but there was a fragility to him, a vulnerability, that was just below the surface. Yet he could not expect to make scornful remarks about golfers and get away with it. So she said, “So, what do you do, Eddie? In your spare time? What do you do?”
The question had taken him aback. He looked at her, almost in alarm. “Me?”
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Isabel nodded. “Yes, you.”
“I chill out.”
She laughed and straightaway regretted it, as his face had immediately crumpled. He was still too weak; whatever had happened, that thing that Cat knew about—and it must be some time ago by now—had damaged him more than people might imagine. Quickly she reached out and touched his forearm. He pulled back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that chilling out—well, it doesn’t tell us much.
Maybe to you . . .” Absurdly, the thought came to her of people sitting in a cold place, scantily clad perhaps, chilling out, beginning to shiver . . .
Claudia led them into the hall. Like many flats in the New Town, this was a generous, classically proportioned space, in this case not very tidy—Cat had a tendency to disorganisation in her personal life, and Isabel noticed the pile of mail that lay unopened on the hall table, alongside a muddle of unsolicited advertisements for pizzerias and Indian restaurants. Claudia saw the direction of her gaze and laughed. “We meant to tidy it up for you,” she said, “but you know how it is.”
“I feel more comfortable with a bit of clutter,” said Isabel.
“And you do too, don’t you Jamie?”
He tried to smile, but the result was halfhearted. Isabel noticed that Claudia was staring at him again. This made her wonder whether Cat had told her flatmate that Jamie was an ex-boyfriend. And would she then have gone on to explain that he was an ex-boyfriend
Claudia asked where they would like to put Charlie. He could have her bedroom, if Isabel thought that would be suit-1 2 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h able. “It’s at the back,” she said. “It’s quiet. It looks over towards Cumberland Street.”
She took them into the room. There was a double bed with an Indian-print bedspread, a small bookcase, a writing table.
Above the bed there was a print of a Hopper painting, a young woman at a table, the light upon her. They put Charlie’s carry-cot on the bed and Jamie bent down to adjust his blanket.
“He’s out for the count,” Jamie said. It was his first remark of the evening, and Isabel noticed that Claudia seemed to listen to it with grave interest, as if Jamie had said something profound.
Then Cat came into the room. She was carrying a small piece of paper towel and she was wiping her hands with it. She looked at Isabel, but while she was looking at her she said,
“Hello, Jamie.” Then, “Hello, Isabel.”
Isabel gave Cat a kiss, a peck on the cheek. As she did so, she felt the tension in the other woman, a tightness of muscle.
“And there’s Charlie,” said Isabel. “Fast asleep.”
Cat glanced down at the carry-cot. She did not bend down to kiss him, nor did she touch him; she just looked. “Hello, Charlie,” she said.
Isabel watched her. She had not looked at Jamie, not once, and that hardly boded well for the evening. The recipes for social disaster were varied and colourful; within the small compass of Edinburgh dinner-party lore, they included the going to sleep of the host—at the table—during the soup course, the soup on the same occasion being so heavily salted that it was inedible and had to be left in the bowl by the guests; an argument between guests leading to the early departure of the offended party; and, of course, inadvertent guest-list solecisms, such as the placing, on one famous occasion, of the survivors of 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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acrimonious divorces next to one another. Her own worst experience had been the moment when, at a lunch party, a guest had blithely asked whether anybody had ever been tempted to commit an act of violence, and the hostess unfortunately, in a moment of dissociative aberration, had attacked a former lover and been convicted of assault, to the knowledge of all present except the questioner. Ill-judged remarks led to periods of embarrassment that could be measured in minutes, or sometime even seconds; tonight’s awkwardness, by contrast, might be measured in hours, if Cat was going to refuse steadfastly to look at one of the guests. This could be done—Isabel had heard of a woman in Edinburgh who cut another woman seated opposite her by looking through her for an entire dinner. That required some skill, and demonstrated, too, how human effort might be misapplied.
