“Gordon,” she said. “Have I met him?”
“No, I don’t think you have.”
“Ah.”
There was a silence. Then Isabel spoke again. “Have you been … Have you known him long?”
A defensive note crept into Cat’s voice. “Not all that long. A couple of months. He’s from just outside Kelso originally.”
I knew it! I knew it! It was difficult for Isabel not to feel a certain pleasure at having guessed so accurately the origins of Cat’s new boyfriend. We like predictability, she thought, and we are always satisfied when people behave as we think they will. It makes us feel … well, powerful; the world is not as complex a place as some might think—at least it is not complex for us. She stopped herself. Nemesis stalked those who became pleased with themselves, and it was wrong, anyway, to indulge in self-congratulation. The line between having an adequate view of oneself and smugness was a thin one, and those who walked too close to it usually fell over the edge. So she simply said, “Kelso?” And Cat, equally simply, answered, “Yes, Kelso.”
“And what does he do?” This was a more difficult question, and she realised that Cat might resent it. After the rise and (not only metaphorical) fall of Bruno—who had been a tightrope walker—the issue of the occupation of Cat’s boyfriends had become potentially awkward. She would not want Cat to think that she was going to draw any conclusions as to suitability based on what they did.
The answer surprised her. “He’s a teacher,” said Cat.
“Oh. Where?”
Cat hesitated. “He’s always taught in boys’ schools. It’s Firth College.” She named a school with a particularly good reputation and a headmaster whom Isabel had met on several occasions and liked.
Isabel nodded. She knew the school, which was only a mile or two away, on the brow of a hill that looked down across the city towards the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife beyond. Her father’s cousin had been there, as had his two sons, and she had dutifully been to see them in the school’s production of The Pirates of Penzance, put on with the help of girls imported from St. George’s School for Girls.
“You remember Cousin Fraser’s two boys?” she said. “They were there. They enjoyed it. A very good school. Nice staff.”
“Gordon likes working there,” said Cat. “The boys are all sons of prosperous farmers and so on, I’m afraid. They play a lot of rugby. There are no discipline problems.” There was a slight note of sarcasm in her voice.
Isabel considered this. There was nothing wrong with playing rugby. There was nothing wrong with being the son of a prosperous farmer. There was nothing wrong with being the son of anybody, she felt. And yet Cat had made it sound like an apology. So was she apologising for Gordon being middle class; for working in a conventional institution with conventional values? “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” she said.
“Maybe,” said Cat. “It’s just that this city is so bourgeois. It really is. Everybody’s so respectable.”
Again Isabel thought: What was wrong with being respectable? And what, she wondered, was the opposite of respectability? It became important to answer that if Cat was suggesting that one should not be respectable. Bohemian? Dissolute? Unconventional? The problem with that was that if everybody was unconventional, then they became conventional. So wild, bohemian, laid-back places, filled with free spirits, would have conventions of their own, which would soon make conventionalists of their inhabitants.
She began to feel irritated. “But, Cat, you yourself are bourgeois,” she said. “Sorry to have to say this, but it’s the truth. You’re ineluctably bourgeois. You own a business. You employ Eddie. You don’t even have a mortgage on your flat. Doesn’t that make you bourgeois?”
There was a silence at the other end of the line, and Isabel quickly continued, “Of course, I mustn’t throw the first stone. I’m bourgeois myself, I suppose—and frankly I don’t see anything wrong with that. I’m very fortunate in this life, I know that, I know that … and I try to help …” She trailed off. One should never boast about what one gave away—and Isabel gave a lot. Yet Cat’s assumption of superiority had irked her, and she almost felt like asking her niece what she gave, which she did not think was very much. And come to think of it, Isabel said to herself, am I all that bourgeois, when I live with a younger man, I don’t engage in trade, when philosophy is my job? This was not the normal pattern of a bourgeois life, whatever that might be.
She decided to move away from the subject. “Those two boys I mentioned,” she said. “Fraser’s boys. Gavin and …”
“Steve.”
“Yes, Gavin and Steve. They went off to university, didn’t they? They must be almost finished by now. Gavin was the older one, wasn’t he? He went off for a gap year in Argentina, didn’t he? He got a job as a gaucho, I think. You must remember that. One knows so few gauchos, I find.”
“Gauchos?” said Cat. “I don’t know any. And what have they got to do with it?”
Isabel laughed. “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating gauchos,” she said.
Jamie would have liked that; Cat did not. “I have to go,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
They discussed the time when she and Jamie would have to leave for Grace’s Psychic Centre, and then rang off. Isabel walked from her study, where she had made the call, to the kitchen, where she was going to make a cup of tea. As she did so, the thought that had been hovering around at the edge of her mind, crystallised: Yes, yes.
She returned to her desk and picked up the envelope she had received from Jillian. She took out one of the papers—the front page of one of the curricula vitae. She hardly had to read it, as she knew what it would say. Gordon Leafers. Place of birth: Kelso. Current position: Senior Mathematics Teacher.
She put down the piece of paper and then picked it up again. She looked at the date of birth. He would be thirty-eight. She smiled. Cat was in her late twenties, which made a gap of about ten years between them. There was nothing unusual in that, but what was interesting here was that Gordon was younger than the other two candidates. And thirty-eight was on the young side for appointment as a principal, which suggested that Gordon was a high-flyer in career terms. That interested her: Cat had chosen respectability.
She went to the window and stared out. She wondered whether she should be astonished at the coincidence, but she realised that she felt no real surprise. As she and Guy had decided over lunch, Scotland was a village, and a very small one at that. She looked up at the sky, and felt appalled. She had been asked, and had agreed, to look at these three candidates, and it transpired that one of them was Cat’s new boyfriend. She now had an interest in the matter and would have to declare it. She could not start investigating somebody who was the boyfriend of a relative, which would go against all the rules, if there were any. But that, of course, was the problem with life. We were often unsure what the rules were or where one found them, even if we knew that they existed. It would be so useful to have a large book that one could put on the table—a book entitled, quite unambiguously, The Rules. Life would be so simple if that were the case; but it never was, and even when one paged through The Rules, one would find areas of ambiguity and doubt, and one’s uncertainty would return. That’s why, she thought, we have judges and lawyers and courts—in other words, as a Freudian might perhaps suggest, that’s why we have Father. But what if Father went away, or said that he really didn’t know about the rules and did not want to start enforcing them? The loss of good authority, she thought; that’s what happened then.