CHAPTER TWO
THE EXHIBITION at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on Queen Street had an intriguing title: Who Were They? One might expect such a title to be explained by a subtitle, but in this case there was none. The aim of the exhibition, though, was made clear by the paintings selected for the show, the criterion for inclusion being a single quality: the obscurity of the subjects.
“I see what they’re getting at,” said Isabel, as she and Jamie began to look at the portraits lining the walls of the gallery. “All these people are pretty much unknown. Forgotten about.”
Jamie peered at a portrait of a thin-faced middle-aged man wearing a high, uncomfortable collar. He looked at the catalogue they had been given on arrival. “This one, for instance: We’re told he was a fireproof-brick manufacturer who set up a children’s home in the late nineteenth century. The children were sent to Canada or Australia to begin a new life.” He paused. “It says: ‘Their fate was a mixed one.’ ”
“Child migrants,” said Isabel. “That went on until not all that long ago.”
Jamie peered at the portrait. “He’s very pleased with himself,” he said.
“If one’s fireproof, I suppose…,” Isabel muttered.
Jamie glanced at her.
“A lot of the children who were sent were used as cheap labour on farms,” Isabel continued. “They were exploited pretty badly. Others…Well, there must have been others for whom it was the best thing that could have happened. Plucked out of the slums of Glasgow or Dundee and given room to breathe on the prairies—there were worse fates.”
Jamie had moved to the next portrait. “Mrs. Anstruther,” he read from the catalogue. “The widow of Mr. Thomas Anstruther of Abergarvie, and the inventor of Mrs. Anstruther’s Pills, a nineteenth-century patent medicine from which she made a considerable fortune. That fortune was left to a trust for the improvement of miners’ housing in West Lothian and Fife.”
“She did the right thing,” said Isabel. “Although I suspect her pills were powdered chalk, and made no difference. But others were not so benign. They loved putting stuff like arsenic into those remedies.”
Jamie flipped through the catalogue. “I like the idea of this show,” he said. “All the people upstairs are well known. The Humes and the Stuarts and the Professor Higgses, and so on. But this place is also full of tucked-away pictures telling a big story.”
“Exactly,” said Isabel. She was now looking at a portrait of a man who had commanded a Scottish regiment in a long-forgotten campaign in a country that had long since ceased to exist. She noticed that in spite of the military uniform, the medals, the officer’s sword with its silver handle, the soldier had a weak chin. Perhaps a man with a stronger chin would not have felt the need for all those decorations, might never have felt he needed to be a soldier. The artist seemed to have drawn attention to the chin, which was painted in great detail, and was the point at which the viewer’s eye came to rest. Perhaps the artist sensed what I have sensed, thought Isabel—that in this man’s chin was his destiny.
“Look at this,” she said, pointing to the military portrait.
Jamie looked, but only briefly. Then he leaned forward and whispered something into Isabel’s ear. She felt herself blush. “Really?” she stuttered.
Jamie nodded. “Obvious,” he said.
“You don’t think you’re being a bit uncharitable?”
He smiled. “Yes, I am. Sorry. Poor guy.”
The crowd had built up. Now a circle opened up around the curator of the exhibition. She handed her glass of wine to an assistant, and began her speech of welcome.
“We thought,” she said, “of calling this exhibition something like Lesser-Known Portraits from the Collection, but realised, once we started to put it together, that such a title would be misleading. These are not lesser-known portraits—these are completely forgotten portraits. But that does not mean that they no longer speak to us, sometimes quite eloquently, of their particular times. So, we chose Who Were They? instead.”
The speech did not last long, and the milling-about continued. Isabel and Jamie became detached from one another when he stopped to talk to somebody he knew, and she found herself standing in front of a small portrait of a footballer of the 1930s. It was not a particularly good portrait, she thought, and was about to move on when the curator, Andrea Clement, appeared at her side. Isabel knew her slightly from the meetings of the Cockburn Society, an architectural conservation body of which they were both members.
“Approve of it?” asked Andrea, gesturing to the walls of paintings.
“Very much,” said Isabel. “It’s a great idea. Another example of the history-from-the-bottom-up approach.”
“That’s what we thought,” said Andrea. She paused. “I was hoping to have a word with you, actually. I saw your name on the invitations list. And thank you, by the way, for your support.” Isabel was a member of the gallery’s patron scheme.
“I’ve always liked this place,” said Isabel.
“That’s why I thought I might ask you,” said Andrea.
Isabel waited.
“We’re creating an advisory board,” Andrea explained. “It’s a fairly informal set-up. Its purpose is to keep us in touch with what people would like us to do.”
“A sort of users’ panel?”
“You could call it that. The advisory board will be quite distinct from the formal governing board—the trustees—and it won’t have any actual responsibilities. I suppose you might call it a sounding board, or a focus group. I don’t much like the term focus group myself, but we all know what such groups do. Advise. Encourage. Respond to ideas. Warn if they think we’re going down the wrong track.”
Isabel hesitated. She glanced across the room to where Jamie was still standing, talking to his friend. Jamie was always concerned about her taking on further responsibilities. “You have more than enough in your life,” he had said a couple of weeks earlier when she had raised the possibility of going on a committee that had approached her. “Do you need to take this on? Do you really need to be on this?”
She had declined the invitation, and yet here was another one. This one, though, was for something in which she had a strong interest. This would not be work, as such. This one…She imagined the excuses she could give Jamie, and then thought, no, it was her time, not his, and even if he was right in saying that she could never turn things down, she was still entitled to do the things that appealed to her.
“You might want some time to think it over,” said Andrea. “I hope you’ll say yes, but you might want to discuss it with your husband.” Andrea glanced over towards Jamie.
Isabel frowned. Why would Andrea think she needed to do that?
“No,” she said. “I don’t need to think it over. I rather like the sound of it.”
Andrea looked pleased. “You’ll accept?”
“With pleasure,” said Isabel.
THEY STAYED FOR less than an hour at the gallery. That gave them sufficient time to look at all thirty portraits in the exhibition and to have enough conversations to want to get out into the fresh air. The opening of an exhibition, Isabel had always thought, was not all that different from a cocktail party, and made the same demands on one’s feet and one’s capacity for small talk. That evening, she and Jamie had been separated at an early stage, and by the time they met again, in front of the beaming portrait of a nineteenth-century brewer, who was bedecked in tartan and sporting a clan chief’s feathers—to which he would not have been entitled—Isabel was ready to leave.
“I think we should slip away in ten minutes or so,” she whispered. “I’d like to have dinner.”
Jamie agreed readily. “I was stuck for twenty minutes with that woman over there…you know the one.” He inclined his head in the direction of a woman in a red silk shift. “I couldn’t get away. I tried, but she kept grabbing my arm and saying how much she liked the bassoon.”
Isabel had seen it. She knew the woman. She always made eyes at Jamie—there was nothing unusual about that. Jamie’s attractiveness rarely went unnoticed, although he often failed to realise that he was the object of appreciative glances. That evening, though, he was being pawed; there was no other word for it. She grinned. “I was going to come to your rescue, but I was caught myself. Somebody was showing me his new Apple watch. Can you believe it? One comes to the opening of an important exhibition and you find yourself talking to somebody who’s keen to demonstrate what his new Apple watch can do.”
Jamie laughed. “There are geeks everywhere. But now they’re no longer ashamed of themselves. They’ve come out. You were fortunate—he might have been a radio ham. My father had a cousin who talked about nothing but amateur radio. It was his absolute passion. He was always going on about wavelengths and antennae. I even remember some of the things he told me when I was a boy.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, the way in which the ionosphere enables you to bounce signals off it. You can send signals all the way round the world like that. But only High Frequency. Not VHF or UHF.” He paused, and gave Isabel a serious look. “There’s a difference, you know. High Frequency signals go between three and thirty megahertz. Very High Frequency signals are between…no, don’t tell me, I can actually remember…between thirty and three hundred megahertz. Yes, that’s right. Don’t try and bounce those off the ionosphere—it won’t work.”
“I don’t believe it!” exclaimed Isabel. “You’ve remembered that?”
“I have,” said Jamie, a little proudly. And then added, “Actually, I not only remember some of that stuff, but he also used to talk to me about human hearing. He knew of my passion for music and he thought I might be interested—which I was, I suppose.”
Isabel was still holding her largely untouched glass of wine. She now took a sip, and waited.
“Human hearing, then?” said Jamie. “Twenty hertz to twenty kilohertz. Low to high. Babies can probably hear sounds a bit higher than that. Cats go up to sixty kilohertz. Dogs, I think, manage about forty, which is not quite so high.”
“Oh.” Isabel thought of Brother Fox, whom they saw in their garden, who sometimes seemed to be disturbed by things that she could not hear. Of course, he was more dog than cat, so his ears would not be so sensitive. She had always thought, though, that Brother Fox had some form of extra-sensory perception, and that, she imagined, would be unmeasurable in terms of these kilohertz that Jamie was talking about. Brother Fox knew things that humans did not know. If there were things of which we were blissfully ignorant, then Brother Fox probably had wind of them well before the event.
“Rock musicians,” Jamie remarked. “They’re another case altogether. There was something in the Musicians’ Union magazine about them. Industrial injury issues. Apparently, the Swedes have been doing research on hearing problems in rock musicians, and almost half of them have impaired hearing—at both ends of the scale—both low and high sounds.”
“Self-inflicted, though,” said Isabel. “They don’t have to be so loud.”
“Perhaps,” said Jamie. “But rock is loud. If it’s not loud, it’s not rock.”
Isabel did not particularly like rock music. Apart from Creedence Clearwater Revival, of course, and…she thought of another band, who were very loud as she recalled, but whose music, or name, she could not remember. She remembered that she had liked them, though. Jamie would know who they were if she could only find some way of describing them, but she could not even remember what they looked like, or where they came from. They were not Swedish, she thought.
They left discreetly. Outside, on Queen Street, it was still light, and the air was warm. It was September, and the days were starting to shorten. In these latitudes—Edinburgh lay at 55 degrees, although a drift of less than 4,000 feet would make it 56 degrees—at these latitudes it barely became dark at midnight. Now, at half past eight, the evening sun was still on the rooftop, still bathing the stone of the buildings with gold. Night seemed to be no issue, and time seemed abundant, almost limitless. There was no urgency in a northern summer, because each day so easily and painlessly became the next day, and the day after that.
A tram rumbled past. A man and a woman, seated at the front, gazed out of the window as the tram gathered speed to climb up to St. Andrew Square. He was wearing a grey overcoat and a brown fedora; she had a pill-box hat and a dark green jacket. There was something strikingly old-fashioned about them, and Isabel touched Jamie’s arm to draw his attention.
“Those people,” she said. “Look. They’re straight out of an Edward Hopper painting.”
Jamie turned, and the couple intercepted his and Isabel’s stares. Then, just before they drew out of sight, the man smiled and raised his hat. The woman looked in their direction and smiled too. Then they were gone.
“They were,” said Isabel. “They really were. They were people from a painting by Hopper. That’s what people looked like in his pictures. They looked lonely.”
Jamie gazed after the departing tram. “They were with each other,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They were. But it was the way they were dressed. The colour of his coat. Her jacket. Her hat. They were Hopper clothes.”
Jamie looked at his watch. “Where are we going to have dinner?”
Isabel shrugged. “There are plenty of places.”
“I think we’re walking in the wrong direction. We need to be going west, not east.”
They turned round and retraced their steps back along Queen Street. A few blocks later, they found a small Italian restaurant that would take them without a reservation, and they were shown to their table.
Jamie glanced at the menu briefly before handing it to Isabel. “You choose. I don’t care what I have.”
She made their choice. “Italian comfort food,” she said. “Caprese salad. Spaghetti carbonara. A red wine from Puglia.”
“Perfect,” said Jamie. “That’s all we need, really.”
“And some focaccia to dip into olive oil.”
“Heaven,” said Jamie. He looked at her, as if he wanted her to agree with what he was about to say. “Do you think we’re lucky?” he asked.
She was slightly taken aback by the question. But there could only be one answer to that, in her view. “Very lucky,” she said.
He smiled. “Do you remember the scene in Casablanca where everybody in Rick’s sings ‘Knock on Wood’? Remember that?”
She did. And she remembered the words. “The singer asks who’s lucky, and everybody sings ‘We’re all lucky’ and then they all knock on wood.” She laughed. “I love that scene. Everybody was so high-spirited.”
“And when they played ‘La Marseillaise’ in Rick’s, everybody stood up and sang…”
“And the extras in the film—the people doing the singing—were real exiles, washed up in Hollywood because of the war in Europe, and they meant every word, and they were in tears. That’s a little detail, I know, but I’ve always remembered that.”
“We must watch it again,” said Jamie. “You and me. I could make some cheese straws, and we could watch it on the sofa, after the boys have gone to bed.”
She closed her eyes. She was immensely lucky. Immensely. But then she said, “But why do you ask?”
He shrugged. “Because people often don’t realise how lucky they are.”
“No?”
Jamie warmed to his theme. “No. Even if they don’t look particularly lucky from the outside, so to speak. They may still be extremely lucky—just to be alive. That’s luck enough, I would have thought. And then, to be living now, at our stage in history, rather than before modern dentistry, and anaesthetics, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for that matter. And here, rather than in the middle of a war zone somewhere. There are so many grounds for considering oneself fortunate. You hardly have to look.”
She agreed you did not.
The waiter came to take their order. Within a couple of minutes he was back with the wine, which he served with a flourish. He was from Puglia, he said, and he was proud of this wine. His uncle knew the man who made it.
Jamie raised his glass to Isabel. “You were talking to that curator person,” he said. “What’s her name again?”
“Andrea. Andrea Clement. I knew somebody called Clement once. I don’t know if they’re connected. They could be. She—the Clement I knew—was a serious basketball player. She had a boyfriend who played rugby for Scotland. He was really tall. Massive. Mind you, she was tall too—hence the basketball.”
Jamie brushed aside the irrelevant detail. Such things could waylay any conversation in Scotland—some link between people. Everybody, it seemed, was linked in some way, and it could be distracting. “Yes, her. The person who made the speech. What were you talking about?”
Isabel hesitated. “The Portrait Gallery,” she said. “Their plans.”
Jamie was looking at her with interest. “And do those plans affect you?”
She frowned. “Affect me?” She could feel her neck getting warmer. It did that when she felt awkward or embarrassed.
“Isabel…” There was a tone of reproach in his voice.
She looked at him, trying not to smile. “I wish I could hide things from you, but I can’t.”
“And I can’t hide things from you either.”
She thought about what she had just said. “Actually, I don’t wish I could hide things from you. I don’t know why I said that. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in a marriage in which there were secrets.”
That interested Jamie. He had always imagined that all marriages had at least some secrets, even if small and inconsequential ones. Or were people franker than he imagined, confessing absolutely everything to their partner? “Everybody,” he said, hesitantly, “has at least something he keeps from those who are close to him. Some secret thoughts, for instance.”
She looked at him across the table. “Fantasies, you mean?”
He looked away. “Perhaps.”
Isabel had started this conversation, but now she was not sure that she wanted to continue with it. Did Jamie think about other women, even if she knew, was as certain as she possibly could be, that he would never be unfaithful to her in the flesh. Did he imagine things, as she had read somewhere all men did? She tried not to think about it, because the thought was so unsettling. And yet, did it matter? The human mind was capable of an astonishing degree of compartmentalisation: Private thoughts, never acted upon, were no threat in the real world of action and feeling.
She almost asked him, there and then, but stopped herself. She almost said, “Jamie, do you ever dream of other women? Just dream?”
Of course she did not mean dream. She meant fantasise: Dreams were another matter altogether. We had no control over our dreams because they happened to us. Nobody could be blamed for what he or she dreamed, unless…She began to imagine a moral basis for the accountability of the dreamer. Perhaps she might even invite somebody to write a paper on it for the Review, in which they would examine whether we might be responsible for the state of our subconscious minds. The argument would be quite straightforward: If you allowed your mind to dwell on certain matters—if you gave those matters mental room—then you might be responsible for the impact of those ideas on your subconscious. That raised the issue of disposition, or character, she thought. A familiar argument against screen violence was that it corrupted the disposition of those exposed to it. And a malignant disposition could—just could—manifest itself in vicious action at some point. In this way, private mental activity, apparently harmless to others, became a threat. If you allowed yourself to fantasise about hurting others—and enjoying it—then some day you might translate your thoughts into action. The police would confirm that, she suspected. When they searched the homes of those suspected of violent crimes, they sometimes found caches of disturbing material—images of exactly the sort of act that had then been committed—the inspiration, so to speak, for what had been done. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: after this, therefore because of this. It was enticing reasoning—a philosophical siren—one of those phrases that provided a persuasive intellectual shortcut, but which needed to be handled carefully.
Of course, none of this was new. The state of the subconscious and the state of the soul were probably one and the same thing, the only real difference being the language used. In the past, people wrestled with demons; now they struggled with attitudes and urges. Was there all that much difference?
The waiter brought their first course, their Caprese salad, and thoughts of the subconscious were replaced by thoughts of mozzarella—which was probably for the best, thought Isabel, because she and Jamie were out for dinner together and she did not want to get bogged down in a debate on the cultivation of character. Jamie was interested in philosophy, increasingly so with each year of marriage to Isabel, but he would not necessarily want to talk about it on their night out, over an Italian meal, with “Return to Sorrento” playing softly, somewhere in the background.
He had noticed it, of course, as musicians do. Most of us are indifferent to background music in restaurants, as long as it doesn’t impede conversation; we ignore it, just as we ignore traffic noise or the hum of the refrigerator. Piped music is like wallpaper now; one accepts it, even if it isn’t to one’s taste. The battle for silence in public spaces had long been lost, Isabel believed.
But now Jamie looked up from his mozzarella and tomatoes and said, “If Italian restaurants are to be believed, they never seem to get back to Sorrento. They think about returning. They sing about it. But do they ever actually get back?”
Isabel laughed. “It’s the same with songs about Skye,” she said. “I think of them in their little boat, heading across the Minch, caught forever by song between South Uist and Skye. Or that song—‘The Road to the Isles’ that Kenneth McKellar would sing with such utter conviction. I see him striding along, cromach in hand, being called by the distant Cuillins, but never actually reaching the end of the Road to the Isles.” She paused. “Which I suppose is now called the A95.”
“Music captures a moment,” said Jamie. “It exists in a realm of time and place that isn’t necessarily the same as the one we live in. You do know that, don’t you?” He did not wait for Isabel to answer, but returned to the question he had asked earlier, about her conversation with Andrea.
“She’s asked you to do something, hasn’t she?”
Isabel speared a slice of tomato. The olive oil glistened on it—little drops of green. A milky streak, the liquid from the mozzarella, intersected the tomato, like lines on a map. She said, “She did, as it happens.”
“And you accepted?”
She nodded. “I know you think I’m incapable of saying no to people. That’s what you always say.”
Obligingly, Jamie said, “You’re incapable of saying no to people, Isabel.”
“Well, in this case, it’s not a big thing. An advisory committee.” She took a mouthful of tomato and mozzarella before continuing, “I don’t think it will involve much. She said there would be a meeting every three months or so. That’s hardly onerous.”
Jamie agreed that it did not sound like much. “But I’ll tell you what will happen. Do you want to hear?”
“I don’t believe I have much choice.”
“Something will crop up. Somebody on the committee will draw you into something. And you’ll be too soft-hearted, too kind to say, ‘Look, this isn’t my business.’ That’s what you should say, you know.”
He looked at her and sighed. “And I’ve told you before, so here goes again: If that’s the way it has to be for you, then that’s the way it has to be. But I’m not going to be surprised when it happens exactly as I’ve said it’ll happen.”
“Let’s talk about Puglia instead,” said Isabel.
Jamie’s face broke into a smile. He reached out and touched her hand. “Of course. Shall we go there one day? Soon?”
“Yes.”
Jamie took a sip of wine. “We’ll rent a house—one of those white-washed houses on the brow of a hill, with ancient olive groves around it.”
“And the sound of cicadas…”
“And there’ll be a hammock for you to read in,” Jamie said. “While I take the boys for a walk down a road with white dust and we’ll pick wild flowers for you, me and the boys, and at night the sky will be studded with stars, and we’ll sit out in front of the house, hoping to feel a cool breeze…”
Isabel smiled. “And the sound of cicadas will still be there.”
“Yes, it will.”
She remembered Carlo Levi. “Cristo si è fermato a Eboli,” she muttered.
He looked at her quizzically.
“ ‘Christ stopped at Eboli,’ ” she explained. “Carlo Levi’s book. He was exiled to that part of Italy in the 1930s. He describes it so well. The desperation, the feeling that the people down there had of having been bypassed by everything. And there’s a marching band in it. It marches over a cliff, but can still be heard playing. A ghost band.”
Jamie said nothing, and so Isabel added, “In Italy, you get the feeling that magic realism is actually realism. There’s no distinction.”
“Oh,” said Jamie. He loved Italy. There was nothing about it he did not like—except the politics, and the bad driving, and the incorrigibility of the south. That left art, and cuisine, and laughter, and the sense of style. Was it not possible to have northern moral seriousness and Italian warmth combined? He thought it was, although he had once asked Isabel that precise question, and she had shaken her head. Impossible, she said. Moral seriousness requires a very different climate: mists, cold, a Reformation. He wondered whether she was being ironical—there was a hint of a smile about her lips as she spoke, which pointed in that direction.
THEY DECIDED TO walk back, rather than look for a taxi or take a bus. There was no hurry to relieve Grace, as she often stayed the night when she babysat, and had offered to do so on this occasion. It took them an hour and a half, as they stopped on the way for a cup of coffee from a coffee stall on the edge of the Meadows. The night was still warm, and there were still people out and about in the encroaching gloaming, such as it was at Edinburgh’s latitude, some of them sprawled out on the grass. Two dogs chased one another, yapping shrilly, ignoring their owners’ calls, determined to make the most of the day’s embers; somebody was playing a radio; a young woman nearby, standing under a tree with her boyfriend, began to sob.
“That’s the end of that relationship,” muttered Jamie.
Isabel glanced at the couple. They were too self-absorbed to care very much that others might see them, but she still looked away quickly, in case they noticed. “Poor girl,” she said. “He’s ending it—obviously.”
Jamie smiled. That was the woman’s view of the situation, he thought—an assumption of male fault. “Or she’s found out he’s been seeing somebody else,” he suggested.
Isabel considered this possibility briefly. “Possibly,” she said. “Although if that were the case, she might be angry rather than sad.” She paused. “I wonder if anybody’s done any research as to whether more relationships are ended by men than by women. What do you think?”
“Everything has been researched,” said Jamie. “There are very few stones left unturned.”
“It would also be interesting to find out whether women think that men break up with them more frequently than they break up with men—if you see what I mean.”
“Whether women think men are usually to blame? Or less faithful?”
“Yes,” said Isabel.
Jamie shrugged. He noticed that the boy had now left the young woman standing under the tree, and was strolling off, back towards George Square and the University Library, which was still ablaze with light for the studious few. “Look,” he said. “He’s walked off.”
Isabel stopped. She saw that the young woman’s head was lowered. Even at that distance, she was a picture of misery.
“Look at her,” said Isabel, her voice lowered in sympathy, although they were well out of earshot. “We can’t leave her there. She looks so miserable.”
Jamie had not expected this. “You mean…”
“I mean we should go and ask her if she’s all right.”
Jamie drew a deep breath. “But it’s a lovers’ tiff,” he protested. “These things happen all the time. You can’t just barge in.”
“I’m not going to barge in,” answered Isabel. “I just want to see that she’s all right.” She looked at Jamie. “If you were crying under a tree, wouldn’t you be comforted if somebody stopped and had a word with you?”
He thought about this. She was right. And yet, this was just another example of Isabel’s feeling that she had to take on the problems of the world, and the world was simply too full of pain and unhappiness for it to be assuaged in this way. A whole lake of suffering, that was how the world might be described—was described and tackling it in this way was to take a teaspoon to that lake when what was required was major civil engineering—seismic change, floodgates, great shore defences. And yet, if everybody had their teaspoon with them, and wielded it when that pain and unhappiness came within their view, then it would make a difference and the level of the lake would drop perceptibly. A few small acts of kindness, performed for those in one’s immediate vicinity, might not change the overall picture, but when hundreds of people, and then thousands, and then multitudes, did the same, it would be very different. Of course it would.
He nudged her. “You go. It might be better if it were just you.”
She thought so too, and began to make her way towards the young woman and her tree. Jamie watched. When the young woman looked up in surprise, Isabel reached out and touched her forearm. The young woman responded. She put her hands behind her neck in a gesture that he found hard to interpret. Coming to, one might call it; regaining control of oneself. A what have I been doing? gesture.
They spoke for a few minutes. Then they separated, the young woman heading up Middle Meadow Walk while Isabel returned to Jamie.
“She’s all right,” she said. “She’s going back to her flat. They’re students.”
“I thought they might be,” said Jamie. “And?”
Isabel took his arm as they continued their walk home. “She’d just ditched him.”
“She did?” exclaimed Jamie.
“Yes,” Isabel continued. “She said that she had told him it was over. He was very upset, apparently. She said he was a nice boy. A medical student. From Carnoustie.”
Jamie showed his surprise. “But what’s that got to do with it? The fact that he’s from Carnoustie. Of all places.” He had always been impressed by Isabel’s ability to ferret out personal or social detail from the briefest of encounters.
“I asked her,” she replied. “At first glance it has nothing to do with it, but then, on the other hand, Carnoustie is just the sort of place in which you’d expect to find decent, respectable boys—like her ex.” She smiled. “I asked her because it helps me to understand the situation.”
“Which is?”
Isabel thought for a few moments before making her diagnosis. “Shall I paraphrase? She’s an attractive girl. She’s twenty, and enjoying the freedom of university. She meets a clean-cut medical student—from Carnoustie. She encourages him but she soon becomes bored. Perhaps she meets a good-looking American student on a year abroad exchange—from somewhere like Dartmouth College. Her head’s turned. She realises that the medical student from Carnoustie is a bit dull. The boy-next-door issue. And that’s the end of the affair.”
Jamie was wide-eyed. Of course; of course. It all made sense, and he could just—just—believe Isabel’s fantasy. And yet…“She was the one in tears,” he pointed out. “But you say that she had done the ditching. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Isabel, her tone slightly sheepish. She had been so wrong. “She said that she found the split-up just too emotional, even if she was relieved that it was coming to an end.”
Jamie was not sure what to say. Perhaps the young woman had felt guilt: Guilt was quite capable of bringing on tears. And of course anyone might feel guilty about being unkind to a boy from Carnoustie. It was a place of well-set small villas and golf courses, braced against the invigorating breezes of the North Sea, a town that embodied the values of Middle Scotland, just as Muncie, Indiana, did the same thing for Middle America. No, one should not be unkind to those who came from Carnoustie…
“Anyway,” Isabel continued, “I’m glad I went to speak to her, even if I didn’t get it right.”
Jamie laughed. But he still said, “I’m proud of you.” And he was: He knew plenty of people who would have paid no attention to that young woman’s tears. Isabel was not one of them.
Isabel did not respond to the compliment, but she was pleased, and she leaned against him briefly as they walked; two lovers walking home, happy in the way in which homeward-bound lovers tend to be.