The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

She took the glass of white wine from him. It was still chilled, with tiny drops on the outside. She moved it in her hand, feeling the cool of it, the wetness.

Jamie said, “This song makes me feel sad.”

She watched him.

He began to sing, and the words, which he enunciated so carefully, and the slow movement of the melody, touched at her heart:

Oh, all the comrades that ere I hadAre sorry for my going awayAnd all the sweethearts that ere I hadWould wish me one more day to stayBut since it falls unto my lotThat I should rise and you should notI’ll gently rise and I’ll softly callGood night and joy be with you all.

He finished and gently closed the lid of the piano.

She did not move. “Why did you sing that?” she asked.

Jamie looked up. “Sometimes I just feel that way,” he said. “I feel sad when I’m happy. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

She thought of the words: But since it falls unto my lot / That I should rise and you should not—words of leave-taking, every bit as moving as those used by Burns in “Auld Lang Syne,” and with perhaps an even greater poignancy to them. Why, she wondered, did we need loss and parting to remind us of how much friendship, and indeed love, meant to us? Yet we did.

CHAPTER SIX

SHE DID NOT tell Jamie that she was going to see Marcus Moncrieff the next morning. It was true that he had accepted her involvement, but she suspected that his acceptance was a reluctant one and that he would not really want any further details. Perhaps he had come to the realisation that this is what she did: she became involved, and he had simply decided that he might as well let her get on with it. She wondered whether it was the same as accepting that one’s partner smoked, or drank rather too enthusiastically, or read frivolous novels; bad habits all, but ones with which one might just have to live. She found herself using the word partner against her will; it insinuated itself into her thoughts; linguistic resistance was difficult, and ultimately futile: there was no point in continuing to call Beijing by its long-established anglophone homonym when a whole generation had forgotten that it was once Peking.

She thought that it was a good sign that Jamie was becoming more tolerant of her involvement in the affairs of others; it showed, she thought, that he accepted her for what she was. Isabel had been perfectly self-assured in all areas of her life until that fateful night when she and Jamie had made the transition from friends to lovers. We can be confident in our dealings with the world when what the world sees is the outer person, with all the outer person’s defences: the intimacy of a love affair is a different matter altogether. And who might not feel just the slightest bit insecure under the gaze of a lover—a gaze which falls on birthmarks, on blemishes physical and psychological, on our imperfections and impatience, on our human vulnerability? And how more so when one is older and the lover is younger.

Jamie made everything different, and she was blessed by his presence. But by accepting him into her life she had given a hostage to fortune: he could become bored with her; he could leave her; he could suddenly find her ridiculous. None of which she thought would necessarily happen, but it could. So this sign that he approved of her was important. Yet I am not to think about this, she reminded herself.

Peter Stevenson, her friend whose advice she sought on all sorts of matters, had been explicit. “Isabel, you must stop fussing about this!” he had said, his voice revealing his irritation. “You and Jamie are together. The age gap is a little unusual. But so long as you are both happy, which you are, it doesn’t matter. And Charlie’s arrival has created a bond between you which will last for the rest of your lives. So stop fussing, for heaven’s sake.”

The three of them, Peter, his wife, Susie, and Isabel had been walking along the Water of Leith together, having had lunch in the Dean Gallery, when Isabel had said something about not wanting to crowd Jamie. The Stevensons had asked them to dinner at West Grange House and she had been hesitant in her acceptance.

“I’d love to come,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

“And Jamie too,” said Susie. “We meant both of you. Charlie will settle, won’t he?”

“I’ll bring Charlie,” she said. “I’m not sure about Jamie.”

“But you can choose the evening,” said Susie quickly. “We’ll fit in with you.”

Again Isabel had hesitated. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that…”

Peter had looked at her quizzically. “Doesn’t Jamie want to come?”

They had reached the point where the road dips down to the Dean Village, at the old millpond, and the path along the river begins. High above them were the soaring stone arches of the Dean Bridge, at the end of which a private house, built into the rock, acted as the bridge’s anchor to the wall of the valley. It was one of Edinburgh’s astonishing architectural details; a house which had been lived in for many years by a prominent psychiatrist, who used to joke that since the Dean Bridge had traditionally been the bridge of choice for suicide, like the Golden Gate in San Francisco, his house should have borne the sign LAST PSYCHIATRIST BEFORE THE DEAN BRIDGE. Some had frowned at this, but Isabel had appreciated the joke; doctors needed their moments of dark humour amidst all the human suffering of their day. She looked up. How long would it take to fall—should the psychiatrist’s counsel prove ineffective—and what would one think on the way down? The Roman Catholic Church used to be charitable in such matters and had been prepared to concede that people probably changed their minds on the way down from these great heights, that the desire to die became a desire to live once the descent began. Repentance, then, could be assumed, and in this way one went up rather than down, in the metaphorical sense; once, that is, that one had come down. Did the Vatican still think this, she wondered, or was it no longer necessary to make scholastic distinctions of this nature, if Hell had been abolished in Catholic teaching, as it had been by liberal Protestantism? She had never been able to understand how anybody could reconcile the existence of Hell with that of a merciful creator; he simply would not have embarked on us in the first place in order to send us to some Hieronymus Bosch–like torture chamber or its more modern equivalent (a place of constant piped music, perhaps). Hell might be an airport, she thought, lit with neon lighting and insincere smiles. No, she told herself; she was prepared to accept the possible existence of a creator, in the same way that she was prepared to accept curved space, but he or she would not invent Hell, whatever twists and turns on the subject of free will and choice were resorted to by the concept’s apologists. Why would a creator want us to have free choice in the first place if we were bound, imperfect creatures that we are, to abuse it? And yet, she thought, who amongst us does not want there to be justice; does not relish the idea that when Stalin took his final breath what he was shortly to encounter was at least some