The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

“Not at all?”

“Well, I might visit it again sometime. I liked it. But not for a while.”

Isabel was not sure whether she should ask the question she was burning to ask. Simon. Cat looked at her astutely; the question did not need to be asked.

“Simon and I have parted company,” she said. “It didn’t work. Long-distance relationships…”

Isabel reached out and touched Cat. “I’m sorry.” She was. Cat needed love and affection and got instead passing and unsatisfactory romance, time after time. But it was her fault—if fault came into it. She looked in the wrong place, for the wrong men, and applied the wrong criteria. That sort of thing, of course, was very rarely something for which a person could be blamed. It was a character defect of the sort which we can rarely do anything about. In sexual matters, we dance to a tune which was composed for us a long time ago, by somebody else, by our parents perhaps, or by biology. Cat’s father, Isabel’s brother, was a remote, handsome man. Every single one of Cat’s boyfriends had struck Isabel as being in some way remote. And every one of them was good- looking in a particular way—the way of Isabel’s brother at that age. Simon, she was sure, would have been like that.

She suddenly asked: “You don’t have a photograph of him, do you?”

Cat looked at her in astonishment. “Why?”

“I’m curious. That’s all. I’ve seen most of your boyfriends. But not him.”

Cat shrugged. “I’ve got some photos from Sri Lanka in the office. He’ll be in some of them.”

“Please let me see.”

“I suppose so. If you really want to.”

She rose and disappeared into her office, to reappear a few minutes later with a small folder of photographs. “Look at the shots of Galle,” she said. “It’ll make you want to go there.”

Isabel opened the folder and took out the photographs. On the top was a picture of a small island, just a few yards out to sea. The island was topped by a white villa, a tattered flag flying limply from the high point of its roof.

Cat looked over Isabel’s shoulder. “Taprobane Island,” she said. “We went there for lunch with a friend. He lives there. It’s the most wonderful place.”

“And here?” asked Isabel.

There was a group of ten or twelve people on a beach. A highly coloured fishing boat was drawn up on the sand behind them. “That was farther down the coast. We went there before we went to a tea plantation—the place I bought that white tea that I gave you. Have you tried it yet?”

“Not yet,” muttered Isabel. She was looking at the group of people. Cat was there, and she was standing next to a man, who had an arm around her. But even without that, Isabel could tell.

“That’s him, isn’t it? That’s Simon?”

Cat glanced at the photograph, and looked away again quickly. “Yes.”

“He’s…so good-looking.” She spoke quietly. “And he looks so like my brother. Your father. Isn’t that strange?”

She said nothing else, but moved on to the next photograph. The tea estate. “That was where they dried the tea. Over there,” said Cat. “And do you see that man? That one? He showed us round. Tea was his life.”

But she spoke as one who was thinking of something else. Isabel could tell that, and she wondered whether she had planted the seed of something that might help Cat; she hoped that she had. Some women searched for their fathers; some men searched for their mothers. Sometimes it was better to search for neither. But she could never tell Cat that; not directly.

SHE HAD a few purchases to make in Bruntsfield, and she went directly from the delicatessen to the fish shop at Holy Corner. She wanted langoustines, and she was pleased to see that there were some, neatly arranged on a marble slab in the window, along with squid and wild salmon. While the fishmonger selected them for her, placing them on a piece of greaseproof paper, she asked him about how they differed from crayfish. “Langoustine are saltwater decapods,” he said. “Decapods. Nice word, isn’t it, Isabel? And crayfish, which are crawfish over the pond, are freshwater decapods. But…if you’re in France, then prawns are called langoustines. As an act of charity towards the humble prawns, I think. To promote them a bit.”

It was an entirely satisfactory conversation. Isabel liked talking to people who knew their subject, and the fishmonger knew all about fish. Many people in shops did not know what they were talking about, she thought. They just sold things; the fishmonger, and people like him, believed in things.

She left the fishmonger and wandered down to the news-agent near the post office. She would buy a paper— perhaps two—and a couple of magazines. Scottish Field, perhaps, because it was so full of comforting things: dogs, wildlife, lochs, glens—an unchanging Scotland that started just a mile or two from where she was standing, where the Pentland Hills swept down to the edge of the city. Then, armed with her purchases, she would go back to the house and think about lunch. She was happy.

She sauntered back. The morning was comfortable—warm enough for the time of year—and the sky was clear. A few gulls, circling overhead, mewed in the wind, and then glided away, disturbed, perhaps, by the sudden appearance of a small formation of geese heading west. The geese were flying low for some reason and she heard the muffled sound of their pinions on the air, that slight thumping sound, punctuated by the calls of the leader. She stood still for a moment, halfway down Merchiston Crescent, and watched them pass overhead. Within hours they would be in the Hebrides, at the very edge of Europe, where they would land on the machair, the sweet pastures of the islands.

Jamie was already at home when she arrived. Charlie had slept for much of his outing and was wide awake now. Isabel changed him and took off his Macpherson tartan rompers in favour of a loose white tee-shirt, more suitable for the warmth of the day.

“We can sit outside,” she said. “A bit later on I’ll make a picnic lunch.”