of Cat’s fiance recently as she had been too preoccupied with the Minty issue. Now he came vividly to mind, and she imagined him, absurdly, on her garden wall, walking along in his elevator shoes with Brother Fox behind him.
Simon spoke. “Something amusing?”
She shook her head. “No. Just thinking about something else.”
“Isabel’s mind works in wondrous ways,” contributed Jamie, from behind her.
Isabel half turned to Jamie. “I was thinking about our friend Bruno,” she said.
Jamie smiled and raised an eyebrow. Now that Simon had finished attending to Brother Fox’s wound, he was taking the opportunity to study the animal at close quarters. “He’s lovely,” he said. “He really is.”
“They’re interesting creatures,” said Simon, standing back from the table. “They might have become domesticated way back—like dogs—but kept their independence. They’re survivors.” He moved forward to pick up Brother Fox, whose eyes opened briefly, but then shut again. “We can leave him out under the bushes,” Simon went on. “It’s a nice summer night. He’ll come to in due course and wonder whether he dreamed it all.”
“He’s going to be all right?” asked Isabel.
“I would have thought so,” said Simon. “He’s tough, and he’s got a bit of fat on him. Some of these chaps are half-starved, but he’s been getting a reasonable diet.” He paused, looking enquiringly at Isabel. “You?”
“Perhaps,” said Isabel. She knew that there was a view that one should not feed wild creatures as it interfered with the balance of nature, but how could she not give Brother Fox the occasional treat?
“I’m sure he appreciates it,” said Simon.
Isabel and Jamie followed Simon as he took the limp form of the fox out of the house and laid it carefully under the rhododendron bush. Then they accompanied the vet back into the house to retrieve his bag, and while Jamie went to check on Charlie, Isabel saw Simon to his car. “Will you send the bill?” she asked. “Or just let me know how much I owe you.”
“Nothing,” said Simon.
She looked at him. “You don’t have to,” she said gently.
“I know. But why should I charge you for looking after a wild creature? He belongs to nobody. And there’s no point sending him a bill.”
Isabel laughed. She imagined Brother Fox hiding a purse away somewhere, a purse with a few gold sovereigns, perhaps—his life’s savings.
“You’re very kind,” she said. It was true. People who looked after animals were by and large kind people; they simply practised kindness, unlike those who made much of it. Thus, thought Isabel, are virtues best cultivated—in discretion and silence, away from the gaze of others, known only to those who act virtuously and to those who benefit from what is done.
She went back into the house to find that Jamie, having checked on Charlie, was clearing up in the kitchen. As he removed the newspaper on which Brother Fox had lain, a small piece of fur fell to the floor. Isabel picked it up. “A memento,” she said, handing it to Jamie. “The Victorians loved putting hair in jewellery. I could put it in a locket.”
Suddenly she smiled, and Jamie, for whom smiles were as infectious as yawns, grinned. “What are you thinking about now?” he asked.
“I suddenly remembered something that I hadn’t thought about for a long time.”
“Tell me.”
Isabel looked doubtful. “It’s silly.”
“Life’s silly.”
“All right. A long time ago, when I was a student, I volunteered to work for a month in France. It was during the summer. A gorgeous, sultry August.”
She had told him about this before. “The place for kids from Paris? The children who’d never seen a cow?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her expectantly. “And?”
“And there was another girl there. There were three of us, in fact—all Scottish, as it happened. There was somebody in Edinburgh who recruited volunteers for this place. Anyway, there were the three of us. Me, a rather frightened-looking girl called Alice, and Jenny. Jenny was the one I was thinking of.” She smiled again at the memory.
“What about her?”
“Well, she had a boyfriend,” Isabel continued. “And she talked about him non-stop. He was called Martin. Martin says this. Martin says that. Martin and I went to Germany once. Martin will be visiting his aunt right now, as we speak. I wonder if Martin is all right. And so on. All the time. She was so annoying.”
“Maybe she loved him,” said Jamie.
“That’s putting it mildly. But it drove me up the wall. Alice was too timid to say anything, and so she just sat there and listened to the Martin stories. I switched off.”
Jamie shrugged. “People get … how should one put it, fixated?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “You could say that. But it was not so much her talking about him that I was thinking of. It was the mention of mementoes.”
“She had a memento of Martin?”
Isabel’s smile widened. “Yes. His boxer shorts. She slept with a pair of his boxer shorts under her pillow. We all shared a room and I saw them. They were a sort of red check. She took them out from under the pillow before she
