“No,” said Isabel. “It’s not what you think. She hasn’t written an article for the
Grace raised an eyebrow.
“It’s something quite different,” Isabel went on. “It’s …” She stopped. Grace obviously wanted to know, but she was not sure whether she wanted to tell her. Grace had a tendency to pry, apparently believing that she had a right to know Isabel’s business. But did she? There were some things that she would find out about, just by being in the house and witnessing Isabel’s life at close quarters, but that did not give her the right to know everything.
She wanted to say, “It’s private,” but it would have seemed so petty, so unfriendly. So instead she said, “I’ve offered to look over some applications for a school principal’s post. Nothing exciting.”
The effect of this was to make Grace all the more interested. “Where?” she asked. “What school?”
Isabel hesitated. “It’s confidential, I’m afraid.”
Grace stared at her. “I can keep a secret,” she said, adding, in an accusing tone of voice, “You know that.”
Isabel did know that. Grace would never reveal anything that happened in the house; she trusted her on that. “All right, Bishop Forbes. You see it if you drive out past West Linton.”
“I know,” said Grace testily. She leaned forward, looking pointedly at the envelope. “How many?”
“Three,” said Isabel. “This is the short leet.” She used the Scots word for
Grace turned. “Come on, Charlie. We’re not wanted here.”
“I don’t want to sound rude,” said Isabel hurriedly.
“And I don’t want to know things you don’t want to tell me,” said Grace. “Even if I happen to know who one of them is anyway.”
Isabel held up a hand. “Excuse me?”
Grace affected insouciance. “I happen to know, now that I think of it. There’s a man called Fraser. He’s one of them, isn’t he?”
Isabel looked in the envelope; the names were clearly written at the top of the first page of each application. Grace was right. John Fraser. “How on earth did you know?” she asked. The envelope had been sealed; Grace could not have opened it on its short journey from the garden path to Isabel’s study, and even if she could, she would not have done such a thing. She might be nosy at times, but she was utterly correct in her dealings with others.
“Yes,” said Grace, not without an air of satisfaction. “John Fraser is the cousin of a woman who comes to our meetings. I sit next to her sometimes. She told me. He told her, and then she told me. He said he wanted the job because at the moment he’s an assistant principal at some school near Stirling. He’s ambitious, she said.”
Isabel digested this. The meetings to which Grace referred were, of course, her spiritualist sessions. All sorts of people went there, it seemed, as Grace often mentioned contacts she had made at some seance or other. She remembered her conversation with Guy Peploe about villages; not only was Edinburgh a village, but so was Scotland.
“You haven’t met him, have you?” asked Isabel.
“No. Not him. As I said, his cousin sometimes sits beside me.”
Isabel nodded. “Has she said much about him?”
Grace thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. She likes him a lot, though. They were quite close as children, I think, and they’ve kept up with one another. He’s …”
Isabel waited. “Yes?”
“He’s a mountaineer, I think. He …”
A shadow moved outside; Isabel noticed it out of the corner of her eye. Brother Fox? He sometimes slunk through the gardens during daylight hours, leaving the path he had created for himself under the rhododendrons and venturing out into the middle of the lawn, blinking in the direct sunlight. What did foxes see? she wondered.
“So he’s a climber. Interesting.”
“I think he’s one of these people who climbs Munros. You know—they collect them.”
Isabel did know. Munros were Scottish mountains above three thousand feet, named after a famous Scottish mountaineer. There were several hundred of them, and the real Munro-baggers tried to climb them all in as short a time as possible; sometimes that was a few years, sometimes it was a lifetime.
Isabel thought for a moment. She, too, had had a cousin, Delia, who was a mountaineer, a cousin of her father’s generation who had been a staunch member of the Scottish Ladies’ Climbing Club. Cousin Delia had taken the eighteen-year-old Isabel to climb in Glencoe, and they had stayed in a bothy belonging to the club. It had been during the high summer, with its white nights, and Isabel had awoken early, not long after four, and the tops of the mountains were already touched by the first rays of the sun. She had ventured outside, startling a couple of sheep grazing at the side of the small whitewashed building, and they had scurried away up a slope, sending scree trickling down the hillside. The experience had remained in her mind, as some moments can, like a photograph filed away in an album, a captured moment of her life.
And later that day, when they were coming down the mountain, for a while they followed the course of a river that was joined at one point by a burn tumbling off the mountainside. At this confluence there was a pool, bounded by smooth rocks that sloped gently under the water. Delia had turned to her and said—Isabel remembered her words so clearly, again one of those curious memories that lodge in our minds for no particular reason—“This is where the men swam; the lady mountaineers bathed in a pool just a little further down.” And in her eighteen-year- old’s imagination she saw the men in the water, swimming purposively, as men might do, while round the corner, in their concealed pool, the Scottish ladies stood half submerged, like Diana and her nymphs caught by some passing artist and fixed for ever in paint.
She looked at Grace, who had picked up Charlie again and was bouncing him up and down, to his evident
