She leaned forward, head in her hands. She had tried so hard to forget John Liamor, the man she had married; the man who had broken her heart, once, twice, over and over again. He meant nothing to her now, nothing—at least consciously.
“I’m not still in love with him,” she muttered.
Jamie came to her and put his arm about her. “Of course you aren’t. Of course.”
He had Cat to forget; he knew what an effort it cost. “Let’s think of the president of Bulgaria,” he said.
CHAPTER NINE
NOT THINKING about something can be hard, as Isabel discovered the next day. She had decided to put the incident in the kitchen out of her mind, but it kept coming back. Did she really want to see John Liamor again? Did he still mean something to her? Did what one said under hypnosis have anything to do with what really was going on in the subconscious mind? Surely the mind was full of all sorts of old memories that were really of no significance for how one felt; they merely knocked about in some deep region, like the detritus at the bottom of a lake. And if they surfaced from time to time, that did not mean very much.
At first it was awkward with Eddie. He avoided her when he came into the delicatessen the next morning, but Isabel made a point of speaking to him. “Eddie, what happened last night is nothing. I don’t feel bad about it, and neither should you.” She took his arm. Again that feeling of thinness. “Don’t look away from me, Eddie. Come on now.”
“I’m really sorry,” he mumbled.
She reached out and put her hand against his cheek. He looked at her in surprise. “Come on, Eddie. You don’t have to be sorry about anything. John Liamor was my husband. I shouted out his name because I obviously still think about him subconsciously. Maybe I still care for him. I thought I didn’t.”
She moved her hand away, and she felt him relax. She let go of his arm. Holding Eddie was like holding a cat who does not want to be held.
“I’m still sorry,” he said. “They told us that we should be careful about what we did with it.”
She laughed. “Well, that’s one way of learning that. And there was no harm done anyway.”
He rubbed the place on his arm where she had held him, as if he had been bruised. “You seemed very upset about seeing him. About seeing John What’s-his-name.”
“He hurt me,” said Isabel.
Eddie looked up sharply. “Beat you?”
“Not that. No. But there are lots of other ways of being hurt. And they can be as bad.”
Eddie was silent. I could say something now, she thought. I could say to him: I know that you’ve been hurt too, badly. But she did not. Instead, she said, “Are you all right, Eddie? You know that I’m going to go down to the bank today.” She looked at her watch. “In fact, I’ve got two things I have to do. Do you mind being in charge for a while a bit later on?”
He did not. But he did not say anything about the bank, and so Isabel persisted. “I’m going to get that money I promised you. Remember?” She paused, watching him. He bit his lip. “You said you were in trouble, Eddie. Are you sure that you don’t want to tell me what it is?”
“I don’t,” he muttered.
“All right. You don’t need to. But if you change your mind about that and want to talk to me, I promise you that I wouldn’t tell anybody else. All right?”
He nodded his assent and crossed the room to get his apron from its hook. One act, she thought; one act of violence, one act of callous gratification, and a young life was made into this.
THE BANK WAS the simple part. They had the money ready for her in a white envelope and slipped it to her across the broad wooden desk. She wondered whether people who worked in banks thought about what their clients did with their money, or whether such interest quickly faded. Money was very mundane, really, and the question of who had what was hardly riveting. Or did she feel that way, she asked herself, because she had more than most? She felt no envy when she read, as one occasionally did, of people earning large salaries or bonuses. But others hated this, and muttered darkly about higher taxes and obscene profits. What was obscene about earning a lot of money? One could not put that reaction entirely down to simple envy; there must be something more to it. Unfairness, perhaps. It was unfair that one should have so much when so many had so little. And it was, she thought. In which case, should she divest herself further? She gave a lot to various causes, and one of these charities had written to her recently in a way which spoke of an appeal—a very tactfully put appeal, but an appeal nonetheless.
She caught a taxi in Charlotte Square and gave the address of the Cafe Sardi, a small Italian restaurant in the university area. It had been convenient for the old medical school before it moved out to the new infirmary, and there were still some doctors who used it to meet for lunch. He had to be in town, he said, and they could meet there.
She was the first to arrive, and was led to a table near the window that gave her a view over the road to Sandy Bell’s. She looked up. There was a picture of Hamish Henderson on the wall of the restaurant; he had been an habitue of Sandy Bell’s all those years ago and must have eaten here too. She had heard him singing in Sandy Bell’s from time to time, that tireless collector of Scottish folk songs with his great lumbering frame and his toothy smile.
She tried to invoke the memory. Yes, the first time she had heard him he had sung “Freedom Come All Ye” and she had sat at her table at the back of the pub with her friends, utterly arrested, unable to do anything but watch that curious rumpled figure and hear the words that cut into the air like the punch of a fist: “Nae mair will our bonnie callants / Merch tae wer when our braggarts crousely craw.” No more will Scottish boys march off to war to the skirl of the pipes. And at the end she had cried; she had been unable to say why, beyond feeling that what she had witnessed was a heartfelt apology for what Scotland had done to the world as part of the British Empire, for all the humiliation of imperialism.
