The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

was really just a mirror image of the savagery of the adult world; remove the adults and the children fell into tribalism and superstition. But if the resulting childish dystopia merely reflected the adult world, then what happened if one removed the adults—in other words, the authority figures—from the adult world? What if we really did kill God, what then? Would we all be rationally committed to the greater good, or would savagery be the norm? To kill God: the idea was absurd. If God existed, then he should be above being killed, by definition. But if he was just something in which we believed, or hoped, perhaps, killing him may be an act of cruelty that would rebound upon us; like telling small children that fairies were impossible, that Jack never had a beanstalk; or telling a teenager that love was an illusion, a chemical response to a chemical situation. There were things, she thought, which were probably true, but which we simply should not always acknowledge as true; novels, for example— always false, elaborately constructed deceptions, but we believed them to be true while we were reading them; we had to, as otherwise there was no point. One would read, and all the time as one read, one would say, mentally, He didn’t really.

But now Isabel had other things to think of. Charlie was going off with Jamie; Grace was tackling a large load of washing, somewhat grumpily, but tackling it nonetheless; and she had agreed to meet somebody for a cup of coffee at Cat’s delicatessen.

“Who are you seeing?” Jamie asked when she told him that she had the appointment. “Somebody about the Review?”

“No,” said Isabel. “It’s somebody we met at that dinner the other night. She was sitting on the same side of the table as you were. That woman who was there by herself. Stella Moncrieff.”

Jamie seemed largely uninterested. None of the guests had made an impression on him that evening, and he was unsure as to whom Isabel was talking about. “Oh yes.” He stood up to lift Charlie out of his high chair.

“Yes,” said Isabel.

He turned away from her, holding Charlie to him. Tiny fingers were grasping at his hand; there was sweet, milky breath on his cheek, soft breathing like that of a small animal. Words had such power, greater power, even, than music, and it still hurt him to hear Cat’s name; hurt him and filled him with a disconcerting feeling of excitement. Cat. It was a name redolent of desire, of sex—Cat. It still had that effect, when he knew that it should not, when he willed that it should become like any other name, stripped of its power to rekindle feelings that he did not want rekindled.

AS SHE WALKED along Merchiston Crescent, Isabel thought about what Jamie had said about Nick Smart. She should not become possessive; she knew that. It was the worst thing that she could possibly do, as it would be massively resented by Jamie if he were to detect it. If she was to keep Jamie, then she should not suffocate him; he had to have his freedom, had to have his own life, and that life included time spent with other musicians. I-Thou, she thought, remembering Martin Buber; the Thou has a part to it that I cannot possess. Neither could she expect to like all of Jamie’s friends, nor could he be expected to like all of hers. She did not care for Nick Smart, but that was because Nick Smart, she decided, had not liked her; that had been obvious on their first meeting. But why should he take against her? Her apparent faux pas over Melisma had been defused through her quick explanation, so that could not be the reason; there was something else. Because I am a woman, she thought; that was it. Because Nick Smart does not like women and, in particular, he did not like women who had claims on the man with whom he was engaged in conversation. I am not the jealous one here, she thought; there was an entirely other sort of jealousy operating.

She put Nick Smart out of her mind and thought about the telephone call that she had received from Stella Moncrieff. She had not masked her surprise at the call, and the other woman had evidently picked this up. “Yes, I know that this is unexpected,” she said. “But I had hoped to have the chance to speak to you privately the other night. Somehow the occasion didn’t arise. I hope you don’t mind my getting in touch with you now.”

“Of course not. And I’m sorry we didn’t have the chance to talk.”

She had been on the point of inviting Stella to the house but had stopped herself and suggested instead that they meet for a cup of coffee at Cat’s delicatessen. This would give her the ability to bring the meeting to an end when she wanted to; it was difficult to do so when the other person was a guest in one’s house; short of lying about having to go out, of course.

Now, as she stood before Cat’s window and stared admiringly at the imaginatively arranged display of foodstuffs, she found herself looking forward to the meeting with Stella Moncrieff. There was something to be discussed, she thought, and the most likely topic, surely, was the other woman’s husband and what had happened to him. Isabel’s curiosity had been aroused by what had been said to her at the dinner, and now, she thought, she would get a further explanation as to why he should be ashamed to show himself in public. The modern world was a tolerant place: even murderers brazened it out these days; they wrote their memoirs, telling all, and publishers fell upon them with delight. There was no shame there, she thought, unless the memoirs included an apology to the victims, which they usually did not; on the contrary, they sometimes blamed the victims, or the police, or their mothers, or even, in the case of one set of memoirs, the mothers of the police. Mothers, of course, were to blame for a great deal; Vienna had established that beyond all doubt. But that was another matter; the immediate question was that if shame had been so convincingly rendered old-fashioned, de trop, then why should anybody feel unable to attend a dinner party on the simple grounds that he stood accused of doing some nameless thing? And what could that have been? Some sexual peccadillo, no doubt, that made him seem ridiculous; some sad story of middle-aged loss of self-control, a momentary aberration, a little thing, probably, but enough to drive him into shamed retreat. The press, in particular, was cruel, rushing to cast the first stone, luxuriating in the humiliation of its victims.

She went inside. Although two of the four coffee tables in the corner were vacant, there were quite a few other customers examining or ordering food from the counter. Cat, who was serving cheese to a tall, rather angular woman, looked up when Isabel came in and smiled a greeting. Isabel smiled back; the days of open warfare in her relationship with Cat were over now, or so she hoped. Even if she seemed slightly remote from him, Cat had accepted the existence of Charlie and had forgiven Isabel for having him with Jamie, her former boyfriend. Nor did Cat resent Jamie’s presence in her aunt’s life, although Isabel was careful to avoid situations where she was together with Jamie in Cat’s presence, just to be on the safe side.

Isabel decided that Cat would be too busy over the next little while for them to talk, and so she made her way directly to one of the spare tables and sat down. There were always interesting overseas newspapers in Cat’s delicatessen, often Corriere della Sera, but sometimes examples that were more recondite, for Scotland at least: The Straits Times, The Globe and Mail, The Age, several days old, perhaps, but nonetheless interesting for that. Today she found a copy of The Washington Post dated four days previously, and she began to page through it, skipping over the political news of electoral campaigns that seemed to go on and on forever. There was a review of a new opera at the Kennedy Center, together with a picture of the composer and librettist at the premiere, alongside various society figures. The society figures dressed as expected, one of the women sporting a tiara and all of the men having that air of slick grooming and benevolence that accompanies real wealth. Rich people, thought Isabel, never look anxious in photographs; they look relaxed, assured, untouchable by the worries of lesser mortals.

“Isabel?”