Chapter Six

At breakfast the following morning, Jamie asked Isabel about her plans for the day ahead. It was a question that he asked almost every day, although Isabel was not sure that he always listened to the answer. It was possible, she thought, that his asking her about what lay ahead was a form of meaningless greeting, like “How are you?,” that few people answered other than with a stock response of “fine” or “good.” Isabel had initially been concerned with the ascendancy of the “good” response, which she felt was misleading—to say that one was good implied a moral quality which was not what the questioner wanted to know about—but she was realistic and knew that these usages took hold quickly, and deeply, and there was little point in resisting them. The accusative case had similarly been under attack for years, and was on the point of raising the white flag of surrender—“They invited you and I” was about to become grammatically correct, she thought, the first stage of that victory, aural familiarity, having been long since achieved.

She answered Jamie with, “Editing to begin with and then coffee with that woman I was talking to last night.”

Jamie popped a piece of bread into the toaster and depressed the lever. “Oh, yes.”

He had not taken in her response, thought Isabel. I might just as well have quoted a line of Sanskrit. She was not offended—it was simple familiarity that led us not to take in everything said by those with whom we lived: We could not listen to everything said to us.

“And you?” she asked.

“Same old, same old,” he replied.

“That’s informative.”

He laughed. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? For most of us, life usually is the same old, same old. I’m teaching in the morning down at the Academy. Five pupils, including that boy whose parents think he’s Mozart, and who isn’t, I’m afraid. The parents are so proud of his playing, although I’m afraid it’s not very good at all. I call them Mr. and Mrs. Salieri.”

Isabel looked serious. “Of course they’re proud of him. If your parents aren’t proud of you, then where are you? They give you unconditional love—that’s what it says in the job description. And we need it. Every one of us needs it.”

Jamie did not reply. His toast had popped up and he was transferring it to a plate. He took a jar of marmalade out of a cupboard. “I enjoyed that concert last night,” he said. “My part-namesake—that Jamie MacDougall—has the sort of voice I can listen to for ages. And he really makes something of those Kennedy-Fraser pieces.” He paused, before sitting down at the table opposite Isabel.

“I’ve always liked ‘The Eriskay Love Lilt,’ ” said Isabel. “I know that some people are sniffy about it, but I’m not. So what if it’s a bit sentimental? So is a whole lot of Scottish music. I don’t mind Harry Lauder—kilt and gnarly walking stick and all. ‘Keep Right on to the End of the Road’ is fine as far as I’m concerned.”

Isabel asked why anybody would take exception to “The Eriskay Love Lilt.”

Jamie gave a simple answer: “Authenticity.”

“You mean they never sat about singing love lilts on Eriskay?”

Jamie grinned. “Who knows? But the point that some of the Gaelic music people make is that she embellished what she heard.” He paused. “And challenges to authenticity can come in twos. She had a daughter, Patuffa, who also went round collecting songs. They were energetic, those Kennedy-Frasers.”

“I suppose people were less punctilious back then. It was the early nineteen-hundreds, wasn’t it?”

“Thereabouts,” Jamie replied. “And nobody had heard the term ethnomusicology then, I imagine. Enthusiasts had no compunction in adding to what they heard. Look at Macpherson and the Ossian poems. Those were wildly popular, but the truth of the matter is that it’s almost entirely bogus. So much for the Scottish Homer.”

Isabel thought about this. She had tried to read some of the Ossian poems, but hadn’t been able to get far with them. It was excessively dreamy stuff, she thought—all very misty and Celtic—and she had never been able to understand why people had been so keen on them. Napoleon was said to have carried Macpherson’s book into battle. There had been famous paintings and opera, all based on the highly dubious folklore worked up by Macpherson and covered with swirling Highland mists. By comparison, song-collectors such as Marjorie and Patuffa Kennedy-Fraser were scrupulously discriminating.

Jamie finished his toast and marmalade. “What did you say you were doing?” he asked.

Isabel told him once again.

“She’s coming here—that book-club woman?”

Isabel nodded.

Jamie said nothing. He pointed towards the upper floors of the house. “And Dawn?”

He lowered his voice, and Isabel did so too. “She’s off to work. I saw her earlier on, on the stairs. She seemed to be in a hurry.”

“Did she say anything?” asked Jamie.

“Not really,” said Isabel. “I told her that Grace would be cleaning the top floor later today. She said something about her room being a bit untidy, but that she would deal with it when she got back from work. That was more or less it.”

Jamie rose from the table. “Academy now,” he said. And then added, “I wish I didn’t have to work.”

Isabel looked up at him. “Are you serious?”

“A bit,” he said. “I wish I could sit about and read and play the piano and meet friends for lunch.”

Isabel got up too. “You could, you know. I’d support you.”

“You’d like me to be a kept man? Is that what you want?”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “Whatever you want—that’s what I want. If you want to be kept, that’s fine by me.”

He smiled at her. “Temptress,” he whispered playfully.

“You’d make a wonderful kept man,” she said. “You might have to be a bit more louche, perhaps, but you’d do it rather well, I think.”

He put his arms about her, and they embraced. He kissed her, and she returned his kisses. He ran a hand through her hair. Then, suddenly, she said, “What’s that noise?”

He drew back. “Where?”

“In the hall. A noise. Something metallic. Didn’t you hear it?”

He said, “A clinking sound? Yes, I did. I thought it was outside. Or the fridge. It makes odd sounds when the compressor switches on.” He paused. “If it has a compressor. The thing that draws the heat out…the gas thing—you know what I mean.”

“No, it was through there—it came from the hall.”

He moved away from her and went to open the door that led from the kitchen into the hall. She followed him.

“Nothing,” he said.

She glanced about her, and then pointed to a place on the floor beside the hall table.

“Are those your keys?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

She bent down to pick up a keyring to which a couple of keys were attached. The keyring had a plastic tag attached to it, on which the word Rothesay was printed. She held these up, and Jamie examined them. “Odd,” he said.

“They might belong to Grace. I’ll ask her.”

“But they’ve just been dropped on the floor,” Jamie pointed out. “That was the noise we heard.”

Isabel looked about her. She moved closer to Jamie and whispered. “Is there somebody in the house—somebody we don’t know about?”

He looked at the staircase. “Upstairs? Dawn? You said she went out to work.”

“I assumed she was going to work,” said Isabel. “I saw her on the stairs and made that assumption. I might be wrong. I thought she was going out—she may have been coming in.”

Jamie examined the keys. Rothesay was a town on the island of Bute, in the west of Scotland. It was a favourite destination for visitors from Glasgow, taking a trip down the Firth of Clyde. “Grace wouldn’t have been in Rothesay,” he said. “She’s scarcely ever been on that side of the country—and she doesn’t like ferries. Grace doesn’t do islands.”

Isabel lowered her voice even further. “Why don’t you go upstairs and see if Dawn’s in her room? Maybe I got it wrong.” She pointed to the hall table. “Leave the keys there.”

Jamie nodded, and went upstairs. Isabel waited. Three or four minutes later he came back down. He shook his head as he approached Isabel. “No sign of anybody,” he said. “The door was locked.”

“Her bedroom door?”

“Yes. I gave her the key myself when I took her up to the room. I remember thinking that she probably wouldn’t use it, but…well, I thought it was a courtesy. I gave her the key that was in the door when we went up there. And a front door key, too, so she could come and go as she pleased.”

Isabel said that she thought that entirely reasonable. “Did you knock?” she asked.

“Yes. There was no reply.”

“That means she must be out.”

Jamie looked worried. “I had the impression the room was occupied,” he said.

Isabel asked him why.

“I just did,” he replied. “You know how sometimes you just know you’re not alone. You can’t necessarily say why you feel that way—you just do.”

Isabel hesitated. She felt a strong sense of unease—and Jamie, she imagined, was feeling much the same thing. And yet, as she reminded herself, there was really nothing to feel uneasy about: All that had happened was that a small bunch of keys had been found on the floor and a visitor’s door had been found to be locked. There was a perfectly rational explanation for both of these events. The keys had probably been dropped by Dawn on her way out of the house. She had locked her door—that was a bit odd, but not completely out of order, as Jamie himself had given her the key when she arrived. Now she looked at the bunch of keys lying on the hall table; she had not checked to see whether she recognised them.

“Is there a front door key there?” she asked Jamie.

He examined them. “No. And I don’t see the key for her room either. That was one of those old ones. All the doors up at the top have their original Victorian keys.”

Isabel gestured for Jamie to follow her back into the kitchen. Once inside, she closed the hall door behind them. She felt a bit foolish: This was their own house, in broad daylight, and they were behaving as if they were harbouring an intruder.

Her voice returned to its normal volume. At least she no longer felt the need to whisper. “When you said that you felt you weren’t alone, why exactly did you think that?”

Jamie spread his hands in a gesture that indicated that he was unable to say more than he had already said. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really can’t say. I suppose I felt a sort of prickly sensation at the back of my neck. You know the feeling?”

Isabel nodded. The mere mention of it was enough to make her experience it right there and then, as they stood and discussed it in the kitchen. It was the power of suggestion; it was the reason why yawns were infectious.

Jamie continued with his explanation. “There’s probably a physiological reason for it. Adrenalin, or whatever. You feel scared and the body pumps out the adrenalin so that you’re primed to do whatever you need to do.”

Isabel asked him whether he was frightened. It had never occurred to her that Jamie would be frightened of anything. They had once discussed being afraid of the dark—Isabel occasionally felt uneasy when she went out into the garden at night alone. He had said that he never felt that way. “Are you worried about meeting Brother Fox?” he had asked, smiling at the thought. “He lurks about at night, doesn’t he?”

She was not afraid of Brother Fox, she said. She had met him in the garden before when coming home late at night; he had simply looked at her as if he were about to say “Good evening” before padding off silently on his obscure, vulpine business. Foxes had their lives to lead, in their private bowers and alleyways, and we had only brief glimpses of how they ordered their affairs.

“I’ve never been afraid of Brother Fox,” she told him. “And I don’t think he’s afraid of me.”

“I don’t think he is either,” Jamie agreed. “I think he likes you. He’s not so sure about me, though. I suspect he thinks that men are crueller than women. That’s been the fox experience so far.”

Isabel thought about this. Would foxes really make that distinction? And then she remembered a neighbour’s dog. He was one of those small, yappy creatures that it was difficult to take seriously, but he was an adept at nipping male ankles. He never bit women, but he went for men with teeth bared and with hatred in his heart. This was because he was a rescue dog, the neighbour explained; he had been maltreated by a man in his previous home and he had drawn his conclusions: Creatures with deeper voices and that general look about them spelled danger.

“But women go on those hunts too,” Isabel said. She was not one for the contemporary demonisation of men and the apotheosis of women: Both sexes were capable of evil, although men seemed to have the edge in that respect. “There are women who dress up in hunting pink, or whatever they call it, and chase after the poor fox on horseback. There are good reasons for fox-kind to dislike women.”

“Why do they do it?” said Jamie. “What prompts people to enjoy the infliction of pain on another creature?”

“Ancient memories,” said Isabel. “Ancient memories of pursuit, when hunting was pretty much all that men did.”

She saw, for a moment, a flickering fire, and beyond it a group of hirsute men, each armed with a spear, preparing to traipse off in pursuit of prey. And their leader, she noticed to her surprise, was Professor Lettuce, who was haranguing a tall assistant clad in skins, who was Christopher Dove, or one of his haplogroup, if she was not mistaken.

Jamie gave her a sideways look. “Are you imagining something?”

She abandoned the Cro-Magnon Lettuce and his attendant Dove. “Men hunted together to survive,” she continued. “And that memory persists. They’re re-enacting old rituals that meant the difference between starvation and survival.”

Unbidden, another image came to her. A fox hunt barging its way through her garden in pursuit of Brother Fox, the horses destroying her lawn with their hoofs, the braying dogs scrabbling away under the rhododendron bushes, and Brother Fox cowering under an upturned wheelbarrow while death barged past him in full cry.

Now Jamie said to her, “Do you think she has somebody up there?”

“Hiding in her room? Why?”

Jamie shrugged. “A man? Perhaps she has a new boyfriend but she doesn’t feel that she can bring somebody else into our house. Guests usually can’t introduce other guests, can they? What do they say on the invitations? This invitation is non-transferable?”

Isabel wondered if Dawn considered herself a guest or a lodger. “Or even a tenant,” she said. “If you’re a tenant in a flat that happens to be under somebody’s roof, you can still treat the flat as any normal tenant would. You can have people come to see you.”

Jamie was adamant that Dawn was not a tenant. “She has no lease,” he insisted. “She’s somebody staying in a guest room—that’s all.”

“A guest room with a kitchen and bathroom,” said Isabel.

“Even so. She’s temporary. She pays no rent. She’s definitely not a tenant.”

Isabel left it at that, as did Jamie. She thought: How easily frightened I am, which is shameful, as reason and observable fact should be the key-signatures of our lives—not speculation and irrational fears—disquieting stories told at the youthful sleepover, making everybody scared of the dark and the threatening things that, once the lights are turned on, it is shown not to conceal.