Those were his exact words. Can you credit it?”
Isabel suppressed the urge to laugh. She could picture the encounter: the outraged Grace and the phlegmatic driver, trying to drive a bus along Grange Road while being berated by his passenger.
“Ridiculous,” she said.
It was a comment that covered all aspects of the situation, but Grace interpreted it as referring to the driver’s response. Mollified, she nodded, and then, remembering what Isabel had said, she asked what it was that she had to tell her.
“Jamie and I are engaged.”
Grace smiled broadly. It was an immediate, spontaneous reaction, and it set Isabel at her ease. “About time,” she said, and she stepped forward and put her arms about her employer. “It’s great news. Great.”
Isabel was astonished. Grace had never given her even a token kiss—birthdays had been marked with no more than a handshake—and now this warm, enthusiastic embrace.
“I’m very glad you’re pleased,” Isabel muttered.
Grace disengaged herself. “But of course I’m pleased.” She looked at Isabel as if any other reaction were inconceivable. “Of course I’m pleased. Do you think that I liked it—your …” She paused and avoided Isabel’s eye. “Your living in sin?”
Isabel gasped.
“I’m sorry,” said Grace quickly. “I didn’t mean to say that. But it’s what I felt.”
Isabel made a gesture of hopelessness. “What do you expect me to say? How do you think I feel about that? Living in sin? What exactly do you mean?”
Grace was now becoming slightly flustered. “It’s an expression. That’s all. An expression. It’s what people say.”
“Used to say,” snapped Isabel, her growing anger now showing itself in her tone of voice. “Twenty, thirty years ago. It’s a dreadful expression.”
Grace shook her head vehemently. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not sin. Not really.”
Isabel stared at her. She forgave Grace a great deal—her outbursts, her possessiveness of Charlie, the implied criticism in many of her remarks, but she found it difficult to accept this. “My relationship with Jamie may not be entirely conventional,” she said, “but one thing I am very clear about, and that is that it is not in any remote sense of the word sinful.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then what did you mean?”
Grace looked down at the floor. Suddenly she started to cry. She started to say something, but the sobs obstructed her words. Isabel immediately felt guilty. She should not have reacted so sharply; it was only an expression. It had nothing to do with sin.
She reached out and touched Grace’s sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I overreacted. I know what you mean.”
Grace did not look up. “I only want you to be happy,” she said. “I really do. I wanted him to marry you. All along I wanted him to marry you, rather than to live …”
“Together,” supplied Isabel quickly. She was sure that Grace had been about to refer to sin again, and she helped her avoid it.
“Yes,” said Grace. “And now that he’s asked you, I really am happy.”
Isabel comforted her. Grace’s shoulder was bony—surprisingly so—and it was hard to pat it reassuringly; but she did, even though the thought came into her mind that it felt like patting an old horse, where blades of bone lay only just below the surface of the skin and felt like … felt like this.
“You must understand,” Isabel began, “that sometimes I feel a bit sensitive about the fact that Jamie is younger than I am. That’s probably why I bit your head off just then. I don’t mean it.”
Grace wiped at her cheek with a small handkerchief. Isabel noticed that it had been embroidered in one corner with an elaborate letter G. It was a small thing, but the sight of this made her feel a sudden rush of sympathy for the other woman. Our small possessions, she thought, can say so much about vulnerability.
“You shouldn’t feel like that,” Grace said. “Not these days.”
“Oh, I know that,” said Isabel. “Everybody says that it’s absolutely fine. They keep saying it, and I suppose I know that they’re right. But every so often, just every so often, you see an expression on somebody’s face that tells you that’s not the way they’re thinking.”
“A look of disapproval?”
“Exactly. Nothing too obvious, but it’s there. People can’t hide their feelings, you know.”
“Ignore them. It’s none of their business.”
Isabel sighed. “Oh, I do ignore them. But I don’t think they see it as being none of their business. We are great interferers, you know. We’re an inherently moral species. If we see something we disapprove of, we experience reactive feelings, even when we know it’s none of our business. And maybe it’s just as well that we do.”
Grace was puzzled, and Isabel explained. “If we didn’t react to the behaviour of others when we’re not directly affected, then people would get away with murder. Literally. We wouldn’t intervene over genocide if it was happening in somebody else’s country. We wouldn’t have done anything about Hitler. Tyrants could act with impunity.”
“They do, anyway,” said Grace.
“I suppose so. We’re selective in our moral outrage. We’re very ready to vent it on the weaker tyrants but not
