Isabel hesitated, and then gave a noncommittal answer. She had decided that the reason for the invitation, which was an unexpected one, was that the MacDonalds had heard about Jamie and wanted to inspect him. She knew that there had been gossip; Edinburgh was too small a place to allow a woman of Isabel’s standing to take a younger lover without people talking about it. And some of this gossip had got back to her, as gossip inevitably does. The truth had been distorted, just as it is in a game of Chinese whispers. In one version Jamie was alleged to be a young sailor whom she had picked up at the Royal Forth Yacht Club annual dance, not an occasion she had ever attended; in another he was the gardener—Mellors to her Lady Chatterley; and in one particularly outrageous distortion, he was barely seventeen and had escaped from Fettes College, an expensive Edinburgh boarding school, to be with her. “They said that he climbed out of the window,” she was told. “After midnight. And that you were waiting for him on Inverleith Place, in your car.” In my green Swedish car, she thought; parked under a tree, in the shadows of night, the engine idling, waiting for a boy.
Had she been more sensitive to criticism, she would have smarted at these embellishments, but Isabel did not especially care what people said about her. She knew, too, that at least some of those who disapproved of her relationship with Jamie were envious; it is not always easy to accept the good fortune, the pleasures, of others. And anyway, she had nothing to reproach herself for: she was barely into her forties and Jamie had just celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday. That was not an impossible age gap, and was certainly no more than that which people accepted when older men took up with younger women. Nobody blinked an eye at that, and yet they judged women differently, and were only too ready to accuse them of cradle-snatching.
The MacDonalds were evidently curious to see what sort of young man she had acquired, and she did not resent their curiosity. In fact, she felt a certain pride in showing Jamie off; she had not set out to get herself a trophy, but if she had found one, then she might as well bask in the achievement. Trophies could be taken from one, be snatched away; she knew that. No trophies were permanent; they had to be given back, and perhaps she would have to give Jamie back, but not just yet. And not, she thought, without a fight.
There were six other guests. Isabel sat on Colin’s left at the dinner table and on her other side was a cardiologist. Colin quizzed her gently about Jamie without appearing to do so. Isabel, impressed with his tact, gave him the information he was seeking: Jamie had a flat of his own in Saxe Coburg Street; he played the bassoon professionally and taught at a school; he saw a lot of Charlie.
“We live together but not quite together,” she said. “It’s not a bad idea to have one’s own place.”
He nodded his agreement. “Of course.”
“And he needs a place to teach.”
“Naturally.”
She waited for his next question. People had talked about Jamie being a kept man; they knew that Isabel had money and assumed—correctly—that Jamie did not. She must pay the bills. She must do.
But Colin was too tactful. “The old assumptions about how people should live their lives—well, they’ve gone, haven’t they? And there are plenty of options.”
Isabel smiled. “I wouldn’t write off the old assumptions too quickly,” she said. “It may be that people are happier in conventional relationships.”
The doctor on her left had been listening. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “I’ve seen so much human unhappiness directly linked to being with the wrong person. It’s as simple as that. People get themselves trapped. And that’s the fault of marriage, isn’t it? So many marriages are just awful. Long spells of penal servitude.”
Isabel turned to him. “A rather bleak view, surely?”
“Realistic. And if reality is bleak, then I don’t see what the point is in pretending that the bleakness isn’t there.” The doctor looked at her challengingly. “Or do you think otherwise?”
Isabel toyed with her fork. “It depends. I’m not sure that I would deny the bleakness; but I’m also not sure whether I would dwell on it. Why dwell on something that will only make you unhappy? What’s the point of that?”
The doctor drummed the fingers of his left hand on the edge of the table, a strange gesture which suggested, Isabel thought, an impatient temperament. Perhaps he had been obliged to listen too long to those whom he did not consider his intellectual equal, exhausted patients with long-running complaints, unable to put their views succinctly. Some doctors could become like that, she thought, just as some lawyers could; prolonged exposure to flawed humanity could create a sense of superiority if one was not careful—and perhaps he was not.
“But most people are unhappy in one way or another,” he said. “I found that out at the beginning of my medical career. Most people are unhappy and afraid; all you have to do is scratch at the surface and it comes out.”
Isabel felt that she could not let this pass. And she had been right; he
She looked around the table. The dinner party was in full swing and the noise level had risen as a series of animated conversations got under way. There was laughter, candlelight, and the glint of silver.
The doctor followed her gaze. Then he turned to her, his head inclined to allow for a discreet aside, although there was no danger of being overheard amidst the general hubbub. “Happy?” he said. “Do you really think so? If I look round this table, I can identify three cases of extreme unhappiness. Yes. Three.”
Isabel said nothing, and the doctor continued: “That man at the end of the table there is married to that woman over there. I take it that you don’t know them? Well, he’s having an affair with some younger woman down in London. His wife is furious and, naturally enough, very unhappy about it. He’s unhappy because he can’t go to London and live with his mistress because he has a business up here in Scotland. And a family. Bleak, I’d say.
“And then,” he went on, “that poor woman on the other side of Colin…”
Isabel glanced anxiously to her right. It occurred to her that the doctor had drunk too much wine and become disinhibited.
“No, don’t worry,” the doctor said. “Nobody can hear. She’s called Stella Moncrieff. And you may have noticed that she’s here by herself. She has a husband, though; they live in one of the flats down below. And right at this moment, I imagine, her husband is sitting down there by himself, thinking of what’s going on a few floors up.”
“Why isn’t—”
