said. “Women are women in their previous lives and men are men. You’ll just be a woman, Isabel. Same as you are now.”
STELLA MONCRIEFF began with an apology. “I haven’t kept you waiting too long, I hope.”
Isabel indicated the chair on the other side of the table. “No, you haven’t. I arrived just a few minutes ago.”
Isabel glanced at Stella as she sat down. She was one of those people it was difficult to place in age terms, but Isabel thought that she was probably somewhere in her early fifties. The trouble, of course, was that clothing no longer provided a cue; middle-aged clothing still existed, but the middle-aged no longer wore it; jeans had liberated them from all that. So now the only way of distinguishing between those who were twenty and those who were forty was by the age of the fabric of the jeans: threadbare cloth meant twenty, cloth integral meant forty, the reversal of what one might expect. Until you looked at the face, of course, or, more tellingly, directly beneath it, at the neck, and then you could tell. That’s where the years showed, like rings in the trunks of trees. And no trick of the surgeon could deal with that; Isabel wondered why people bothered with plastic surgery, with the nips and tucks, the stretching and plastering that left the victim looking like the mask of a Japanese Noh actor, flattened, pinned back in perpetual discomfort. Who was that unfortunate queen, she asked herself—an earlier queen of the Netherlands, was it not—who was one of the first to have plastic surgery and had been left with a perpetual smile? And then her husband had died and the surgeons had been obliged to perform frantic corrective surgery so that the queen should not appear to be too cheerful about her husband’s death.
Isabel smiled at the thought, and Stella Moncrieff returned the smile.
“It’s good of you to see me,” she said. “I sat at the telephone for ages, plucking up the courage to call you.”
The frankness of this remark struck Isabel. “But why? Why worry about phoning me? I’m not…” She trailed off. None of us is.
“Oh, you know how it is. You meet somebody briefly, and you wonder whether they want to hear from you.”
“I was delighted to hear from you. I hoped that we might have had a longer conversation the other evening. But dinner parties of that size…”
Stella nodded. “You know, I had asked them to invite you…I wanted to meet you, you see.”
Well, thought Isabel, that at least explained the invitation; it was nothing to do with Jamie. She hesitated for a moment, and then decided to be as frank with Stella as Stella was being with her. There was something about the moment which prompted confession. “Well, I was wrong about that,” she mused. “I thought that they had invited me because of Jamie.”
Stella looked blank.
“The young man I was with,” Isabel said.
For a moment Stella’s puzzlement continued. “The young man with…with the dark hair? That lovely looking one?”
Isabel felt an intense flush of pleasure. He was lovely looking. It was not just a case of her looking upon him with a lover’s eyes; lovers will make anything lovely. “Well, yes,” she said. “I suppose he is.”
There was still something Stella did not seem to understand. “You were with him?”
Isabel’s pleasure began to turn into annoyance. “Yes,” she said. “We have a child together.”
The disclosure unnerved Stella, who struggled to maintain her composure. “Of course…But, why would they have invited you because of him?”
“To see him. To inspect him. It’s fairly recent. And, well, people have talked about it a bit. He’s a few years younger than I am.”
“I could tell that.” It slipped out, and could not be retracted. But Isabel did not care. She had decided that she liked Stella.
“Anyway, from what you tell me it had nothing to do with Jamie.”
“No. It was me. I wanted to meet you, you see. And I’m afraid I seem to have very little confidence these days. I know it’s silly, but it’s just the way things are.”
Isabel decided to take the initiative. “I heard something,” she said. “That doctor I was sitting next to, the cardiologist, he said that there had been some issue with your husband.”
Stella looked away. “That’s one way of putting it.” She paused and looked back up at Isabel. “The truth of the matter, Isabel, is that I want you to help him. I know that you don’t know me. I know that our troubles have got nothing to do with you, but that’s the problem, you see, our troubles have got nothing to do with anybody. Except us.” She made a gesture of despair. “So what am I to do? I can’t do anything myself, and Marcus, that’s my husband…he’s paralysed with guilt and self-reproach. With shame, too. He’ll hardly leave the house. Won’t talk to his old friends.”
Isabel listened carefully. It was not clear to her why Stella had chosen her. She decided to ask.
“Because I’ve heard about you,” said Stella. “I knew somebody you helped a couple of years ago. Nobody asked you. You just helped. And you made a difference.”
Isabel noticed that Eddie was signalling from the counter, making a gesture towards the coffee machine. She nodded to him and then said to Stella, “They make a particularly good cappuccino here. Would you…”
“Yes. Please.”
“And then you can tell me exactly what the problem is. I can’t imagine that I’ll be of any use, but tell me anyway, and I’ll do what I can.”
It sounded so trite to her, even as she said it; the stock scene from the detective novel. The investigator reassures the distraught wife. Find out who’s blackmailing/having an affair with/holding prisoner my husband, please. Don’t worry, I’ll do what I can. And then the relief on the face of the supplicant.
