“Why isn’t he here?” the doctor interrupted. “It’s shame. She goes out by herself. He’s too ashamed to go anywhere. Nobody sees him anymore. Never shows up at the golf club—he used to play off a handicap of four. Never goes to the theatre, opera, what have you—nowhere. And all because the poor man’s ashamed of what he’s accused of doing.” He paused and reached for his glass. “Although I, for one, take the view that he’s entirely innocent. He didn’t do it. But that doesn’t make things any better.”
Isabel was about to ask what it was that he had done when the conversation suddenly shifted. Colin, who had been busy with his neighbour, turned to Isabel and asked her about the journal she edited. “Do many people read it?” he asked.
Pride made Isabel want to say that they did, but truthfulness intervened. “Not many,” she said. “In fact, sometimes we publish papers that I suspect next to nobody reads.”
“Then why publish them?” asked the doctor.
Isabel turned to him. “A simple utilitarian reason,” she said evenly. “Because it adds to happiness. In a very small way, but it does.” She paused. “And then, there are some conversations that may have very few participants, but which are worth having anyway.”
The doctor stared at her for a moment, and then looked down at his plate. On the other side of the table, Jamie caught Isabel’s eye; his look flashed her a message, but she could not make out what it was. It might have been
The doctor, looking up, witnessed the exchange, and threw a quick glance at Isabel.
“That’s Jamie,” whispered Isabel. “He’s here with me. And I can assure you that if he’s unhappy it’s a purely temporary condition.”
CHAPTER TWO
RAMSAY GARDEN,” said Isabel.
“Gardens,” corrected Grace, her housekeeper. Grace was punctilious in all matters and would not hesitate to point out mistakes, whether made by her employer or by anybody else. She was particularly fond of correcting politicians, whose pronouncements she weighed with great care, searching for inconsistencies—and for half- truths—of which she said she found many.
This time she was wrong. “Actually it’s Garden,” said Isabel. “Singular. Probably because the houses were built up around a small garden.”
Grace was glowering at her, but Isabel continued: “Mr. Ramsay’s garden, no doubt. The poet, that is, not his son the painter. He had a house there, I understand. He came to Edinburgh as a wigmaker and did extremely well. Then he became a bookseller and his son became an artist.”
Grace was tight-lipped. “I see.”
They were in the kitchen of Isabel’s house, Grace having just arrived for work. She had found Isabel at the table, the
There was no sign of Charlie, apart, that is, from a small red fire engine and an already-battered stuffed bear propped up against the leg of a chair. His absence, though, was quite normal: Charlie was a child of habit, and he awoke every morning at five forty-five more or less exactly. Isabel would give him his breakfast and play with him for precisely two hours, when, with the same regularity with which Immanuel Kant took his daily walk in Konigsberg, Charlie would begin to yawn. By the time Grace arrived he would be sound asleep, and would remain in that state until nine thirty, when he would awake with a hungry howl.
Isabel had adjusted remarkably quickly to these early starts to the day. She reminded herself that there were parents whose day began much earlier. At the informal mothers and toddlers group that she attended at the coffee bar at the top of Morning-side Road, there was a mother who was wakened each morning at three by a hyperactive son; she at least did not have to contend with that. And there was another respect in which she knew that she was inestimably privileged. She had Grace to help her with Charlie during the day, and Jamie, of course, to help her in the evenings. And when it came to babysitting, as it had the previous night, there was a sixteen-year-old girl farther down the street who was always available and keen to earn a little pin money. Nobody else in the mothers and toddlers group was in that position, and so Isabel was discreet; Grace had never been mentioned in that company, although, if asked, she would have admitted that she had help. Wealth, thought Isabel, was something that should not be flaunted—even indirectly—but one should not lie.
“And did you enjoy it?” Grace asked, moving to the sink, where a few cups had accumulated.
“Oh, it was the usual sort of dinner party,” Isabel said. “A fair amount of gossip. Chitchat. And we didn’t particularly enjoy it. In fact, Jamie didn’t enjoy it at all.”
She looked at Grace, and found herself wondering whether the other woman ever had meals with friends. Grace lived by herself; there had been a man, some time ago, but he was never mentioned, and Isabel realised that she did not want to talk about him. Once, only once, had Grace mentioned him, and had been on the point of saying more, but tears had intervened and the subject was dropped. He had been unfaithful, Isabel assumed, or merely indifferent perhaps; hearts can be broken in so many different ways.
Grace had friends, but Isabel was not sure whether they were the sort to meet one another for dinner; somehow she thought they were not. Many of these friends, although not all, were members of the spiritualist circle to which Grace belonged, and Isabel felt as if she knew them from the accounts which Grace gave of their meetings. The previous evening, for instance, when she and Jamie had been at the dinner in Ramsay Garden, Grace had been at a spiritualist meeting, and one of her friends, Georgina, had received a message.
“I know that you have your doubts about it,” Grace informed Isabel, as she began to load the dishwasher. “But there was a very good medium at the meeting last night. A man from Lerwick, a Shetlander. You don’t often get mediums from up north. It’s the first time, in fact, that we’ve had anybody from the Shetland Islands—or even from Orkney.”
Isabel looked up from her crossword. She had heard about Georgina, who looked after an aged mother in Leith
