Jamie leapt to his feet. “He’s awake,” he said.
Cat looked annoyed. “Can’t you leave him to settle?” she said. “Won’t he drop off again?”
“No,” said Jamie, abruptly. “You can’t neglect a baby.”
Cat’s eyes flashed. “I didn’t say neglect, for heaven’s sake.
I said—”
“I’m going to go and get him,” said Jamie.
They watched him leave the room. Cat looked at Isabel and smiled conspiratorially. Isabel did not return the smile. In her view, Cat wanted her to be complicit in the judgement that Jamie was overreacting, that he would not really know how to deal with a niggling baby. But she was not prepared to do that.
“He’s very good,” she said.
Cat turned to Claudia and mouthed something. Isabel caught her breath. It was difficult to tell, and perhaps she had imagined it—surely she had imagined it—but it seemed to her that the words that Cat had mouthed to her flatmate were these:
“THAT WAS A DISASTER.”
Jamie nodded. “You can say that again.”
They were travelling home in a taxi. Going up the Mound, the lights of the Castle above them and the dark valley 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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Princes Street Garden to their right, they watched the late-night life of the streets—the groups of students, boisterous, heading for clubs and pubs, the couples arm in arm, the clusters of people under bus-stop shelters. Charlie had niggled and cried from the moment he had woken up at that early stage, and the atmosphere at the table had been tense and uncomfortable. They had left the moment the meal was over and had gone down the stairs in silence. Jamie was cross with her, Isabel thought, but she did not know what she had to apologise for. For disagreeing with him over new operas? For accepting the invitation in the first place?
“I’m sorry,” she said as the taxi crested the brow of the High Street and began to make its way towards George IV Bridge.
“I’m sorry for whatever I’m meant to have done.”
“You didn’t do anything,” muttered Jamie. “It’s just that I hated the whole thing. I hated the way Cat behaved. I hated her attitude towards Charlie.”
Isabel sighed. “It’s very complicated,” said Isabel.
“Everything’s too complicated,” said Jamie. “The whole lot’s too complicated.”
“Why don’t we go away then?” said Isabel. She said this without thinking, but after she had said it she realised that it was a good idea. They needed to get away, with Charlie, to be by themselves. A few days would make all the difference.
Jamie did not reject the possibility out of hand.
“Go away where?” he asked.
Again Isabel did not think before she spoke. “Jura,” she said.
“All right,” said Jamie. He still seemed low, and she reached out and took his hand in hers. She sensed his tension, but he did not draw his hand away, and by the time they reached Bruntsfield Place and were travelling past the darkened windows of Cat’s delicatessen, he was stroking her wrist with his 1 2 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h fingers, gently, tentatively, with the touch of a lover who has found out again that he is in awe of the person he loves.
Isabel thought of the outrageous thing that she had imagined Cat to have mouthed. True, she thought, and smiled to herself.
C H A P T E R T E N
E
HER SUGGESTION that they should go to Jura for a few days did not look as impulsive in the cold light of morning as she had thought it might. Jamie had been slightly taken aback by the idea—they had not planned to go away together, but now that the idea had been floated, he decided that he rather liked it.
“The Hebrides are ideal,” he said. “I was on Harris a few years ago—do you know it? I love it there. And we went down to South Uist as well. There’s this wonderful feeling that one is right on the edge.”
“And one is,” said Isabel. “The very edge of Scotland. Of Europe too.”
Jamie looked out the window—they were in the kitchen, having breakfast—and the morning sun was streaming in through the large Victorian window, illuminating floating specks of dust that were drifting like minute planets in space. “Isn’t it odd,” he said, reaching out and creating a whirlwind in the air before him, “how we think of air as being empty, but it’s full of things. Bits of dust. Viruses too, I suppose.”
Isabel was thinking of the Hebrides. “And Jura?” she asked.
“Have you been there?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie shook his head. “I get the Inner Hebrides mixed up,”
he said. “Jura is the one which is next to Islay, isn’t it? Off the Mull of Kintyre?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “Islay’s much bigger. It makes more whisky—it has six or seven whisky distilleries, I think. Then there’s Jura. The Island of Deer—that’s what it means in Norse.”
“Ah,” said Jamie. “I’ve seen it from Islay but I’ve never been on it.” He paused, and looked at Isabel with
