Chapter Eighteen
It was two weeks later. It was evening: one of those long, drawn-out summer evenings, when the light still lay across Scotland like a gentle, translucent veil of gold. Jamie sat on one side of the kitchen table, and Isabel on the other. Charlie and Magnus were upstairs asleep; they had both been at a trampoline party—there were constant birthday parties at that age, making the social calendars of those six- and seven-year-olds as crowded as those of an unreformed socialite—and they were tired out. Bouncing depletes the reserves of energy even of small boys, who otherwise seem capable of going on indefinitely. Their heads were now on their pillows and were filled with the things of small boys’ dreams: rockets and dogs and railway engines, innocent things that they would, Isabel hoped, not abandon too quickly as they went through life. Even an adult life has room for old steam engines and bits of string, for bows and arrows, and construction sets.
Jamie was doing the cooking. He had offered to do so since it was a Saturday, and by tradition he cooked on that evening—and on others, of course. She was expecting potato dauphinoise, which she could have, she said, at any time, but he had chosen to do something quite different. He had taken off the shelf his copy of one of Mary Contini’s cookbooks, A Year at an Italian Table. He and Isabel knew the Continis, and he had even dared to cook for Mary and Philip a few months earlier. They had complimented him on his dishes, and had assured him that they really meant it.
That evening he was trying a Neapolitan seafood risotto, using a shellfish stock that he had prepared a few days earlier. Both he and Isabel liked risotto in all its forms, but this one was slightly more ambitious than the usual mushroom version Jamie made.
Isabel watched him from her side of the table. Before her was a glass of white Italian, a Vermentino that Valvona & Crolla had recently imported. “Philip says this is particularly good for those moments when everything is going well,” Isabel said. “Do you agree?”
“That the wine suits such moments?” asked Jamie. “Or that everything is going well right now?”
“Both,” said Isabel. “But start with the wine.”
Jamie turned from the cooker to take a sip from his glass. “Yes,” he said. “Perfect. Or should I say perfetto?”
“Either will do,” said Isabel. “Or both. Italian perfetto might be even more forceful than its English equivalent. They use their hands to underline the perfection. Language is not only a matter of words, don’t you think?”
He smiled. It was fun being married to Isabel and to follow her conversation wherever it led—and it led to some pretty unexpected places.
“I wish I was Italian,” he said, taking another sip of the Vermentino.
She looked at him. “Isn’t it enough to be Scottish?”
He hesitated, but only briefly. “Yes, of course it is. I love Scotland.” He paused. “I love it more than I can say.”
There was a moment of silence between them. Sometimes that happened when they talked about Scotland.
“I love Scotland because it breaks the heart,” he said quietly. “As MacDiarmid said. Remember?”
Isabel knew the poem—how could she forget it? MacDiarmid had said that he did not want the rose of all the world—that the little white rose of Scotland would suffice. That rose, he said, broke the heart.
She nodded. But Jamie had said that he would also like to be Italian. Why was that?
“Because of everything,” he replied. “Because of Florence and Siena. Because of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Because of Verdi. Because of Botticelli and Caravaggio. Because of…of risotto ai frutti di mare and Vermentino from the hills of Tuscany. Because of all that.” He paused. “What would you be, Isabel, if you weren’t Scottish, that is.”
She reminded him that she was half American. “There was my sainted American mother, remember.”
“Of course. Could you do without the Scottish bit? Is that what you’d prefer?”
She said that she would not. She was happy with both heritages. But she would not decline to throw her hat in with her mother’s people if she were ever pushed to do so. “America is a good country,” she said. “It sometimes gets it wrong—who doesn’t? But who does everyone turn to when things get really bad? Doesn’t that tell you something?”
Jamie said that he thought it did.
“America’s a great idea,” she said. “Think of the music and the fun and the marching bands.”
Jamie laughed.
“And the things that have nothing to do with marching bands and popcorn: the great universities and the Library of Congress and T. S. Eliot.”
“He jumped ship, though, didn’t he?”
“Perhaps. But then Auden went in the opposite direction.”
Jamie nodded. “The fickleness of poets.”
“Anyway,” said Isabel. “You asked what I might like to be—if I weren’t what I am. Well, you won’t laugh, I hope, if I tell you that I would love to be Swedish. I really would. I’ve wanted to be Swedish for ages, but…”
“But you never seem to get there?”
She shook her head. “No, I haven’t. I’ve watched all those Bergman films. I’ve had platefuls of smørrebrød. I’ve tried to get depressed. I’ve done my best, I really have.”
Jamie laughed. “You can’t become Swedish, you know. It’s one of those closed identities—of which there are quite a few. But it’s even harder to be Finnish. You have to learn Finnish if you have that in mind, and that’s impossible, I gather. Even for Finns. A lot of them say they haven’t really mastered the language although it’s their native tongue.”
“And I have a Swedish car,” Isabel continued. “I feel quite Swedish when I’m driving.”
A pot behind Jamie started to boil over. This was the arborio rice, and he needed to attend to it. Over his shoulder he said, “May I ask you something, Isabel? How did you arrive at your solution for the book group?”
“Sudden, blinding insight,” said Isabel. “Not that I want to sound self-congratulatory, but it came to me. You know how solutions sometimes jump up in front of you? It was like that. I suddenly knew.”
Jamie turned back to face her, and smiled broadly. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“So Roz said. She called me this morning, by the way. I meant to mention it to you. She said that several members had been in touch with her about yesterday’s meeting. They were all extremely pleased.”
“Once the idea came to you, were you convinced it would work?” asked Jamie.
Isabel thought for a moment. She had felt some misgivings, but nothing serious. “It was a bit of a punt,” she said. “But I think the basic supposition made sense.”
“The basic supposition being?”
“That single sex groups may work—sometimes—but that when they don’t work, the reason is the simple fact that they’re single sex.”
He waited for her to continue.
“You see, I could tell,” she said, “that those women were just going to carry on needling one another. The chemistry was all wrong, for whatever reason. Some of them were competitive, some were arrogant, some were neither here nor there. I saw all that and realised that what they needed was a man in the book group. If there was a man, they’d lose interest in their private quarrels. They wouldn’t want to show themselves up in the presence of a man.”
Jamie burst out laughing. “This is sounding very old-fashioned,” he said. “Even a bit reactionary.”
Isabel shook her head. “No,” she said. “Ordinary psychology—folk psychology, if you like—doesn’t have to be reactionary. It tends to be based on long observation of how human beings tick. And one of the things you can see if you only open your eyes is that men and women can behave badly when they’re in single sex groups. This applies as much to men as it does to women—perhaps even more so in the case of men. Men can behave in a very foolish and immature way when it’s just them in the room, so to speak.”
Jamie agreed. “Yes, they can.” He thought of something. “Did I ever tell you about what happened at school when it first stopped being a boys-only school? Did I tell you about that?”
Isabel shook her head.
“The school used to be only for boys when I first went to it,” said Jamie. “Then, when I was in my penultimate year there—I was sixteen-ish—they started to admit girls. I remember the first day they joined us. We had three girls come into our class of nineteen boys. And I remember that one of the boys was using a wooden ruler to flick pellets of paper at this poor guy called Winston Churchill Macgregor—yes, that’s what his folks had named him, can you believe it? He just called himself Win, but somebody had seen his school record, which had his full name on it. He was a bit uncoordinated, and he was hopeless at ball games. He played chess quite well, but sixteen-year-old boys are not all impressed with that sort of thing. The only thing that impresses them, I think, is themselves. Anyway, I remember that on the day that the girls joined us, some of the boys were picking on poor Win Macgregor and they handed one of the girls a ruler and offered to show her how to flick pellets at him. She looked at them with utter scorn and said, ‘But why?’ They looked sheepish and just gave up. And everything was different from then on.”
“Poor Winston Churchill Macgregor,” said Isabel. “Did things get better for him?”
Jamie brightened. “Yes, they did. He married an Italian model and went to live in Milan. His father-in-law had a fashion house there. Nobody could believe it.”
“A happy ending.”
“Very happy. But it makes the point, doesn’t it. Girls were a civilising influence.”
Isabel agreed. “I think they are. But there is the counterpart, remember: There are cases where groups of women will be improved by the addition of men. Not always, of course, but sometimes. And I think this has been one of them.”
Jamie looked thoughtful. “I was a bit worried when you asked me to join the book group. But it went really well last night. They were all very polite to one another. I’d say that they were on their best behaviour.”
“No disparaging remarks?”
“No.”
“No trying to put other members down?”
“Not that I saw,” said Jamie.
“Well, there you are: success. And that’s very much what Roz said when she telephoned this morning. She’s very grateful.” Isabel paused. “And you don’t mind continuing to be a member?”
“Not at all,” said Jamie. “I’ve been wanting to read more—I think we talked about that, didn’t we? When you were talking about living on an island. You said I’d have more time to read.”
Isabel remembered. Perhaps they would discuss that again one day.
“I think more men should join book groups,” said Jamie. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”
“Many men don’t know what they’re missing in general,” observed Isabel.
Jamie looked at her, uncertain how to take that remark. But Isabel just smiled. She did not intend to explain, possibly because she was not quite sure what she had meant, although she thought it was probably true.
He served the risotto, which lived up to its enticing smell. He poured a further glass of Vermentino. He filled two water glasses with San Pellegrino mineral water. He put a piece of ciabatta bread on Isabel’s side plate, and then sprinkled it with olive oil from a small clear glass jug.
“So you saw Cat this morning?” Jamie asked.
“Yes. I went down to her shop.”
Jamie asked her whether Cat had told her about Gordon.
“She didn’t say much about him,” she said. “But I think that’s the last we’ll hear of him. She said that there had been some problem in Antigua. She said that Gordon was implicated in something that happened on board, but she was not sure what it was. She said that she was not going to stick with somebody who could keep things from her. It’s over, she said.”
“Oh dear. Poor Cat. She doesn’t seem to pick the right men, does she?”
“Some people are like that,” said Isabel. “And some men too.”
“We’re all flawed,” agreed Jamie. “Each in our particular way. We look for happiness, but we stumble on the path. We all stumble.”
She remembered Dawn. “Is Dawn all right?”
Dawn had moved out. She had found a flat and was sharing with another nurse and a radiographer. The radiographer was a long-distance runner and had involved Dawn in the sport. “They have miles and miles to go,” said Jamie.
Isabel thought about that. We all had miles and miles to go, in our individual ways.
They finished the risotto. There was cheese to follow—plain Parmesan, but aged for almost five years, which made it special.
“Five years is quite a long time in the life of a cheese,” said Isabel.