“These principals?”
“Yes, or would-be principals.”
He waited.
“The woman with the ginger hair,” she continued, “is called Cathy. She’s the cousin of one of the candidates. Grace told me.”
Jamie reached for another bit of bread. “The trouble with this French bread,” he said, “is that it’s too tasty. You could fill up on it before anything else arrived.” He dipped the bread into the olive oil, allowing a small drop to fall back into the bowl. “So? Did you find out anything?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. I managed to bring up her cousin’s name. I said, ‘Aren’t you John Fraser’s cousin?’ and before she had the chance to ask me whether I knew him, I said, ‘I haven’t seen him recently.’ That was absolutely true. I might have said, ‘I’ve never seen him,’ but at least I didn’t lie.”
Jamie looked at her. He smiled. “You didn’t lie? No, I suppose you didn’t. Not technically.”
“I didn’t lie,” she repeated firmly.
“All right. And what did she say then?”
Isabel told him that she had asked about John’s climbing. Did he climb as much in the summer as in the winter? Was he planning to go abroad?
“She was clearly very proud of him,” Isabel said. “Just as Grace had told me. But then, just after she said something about how he had been talking for years about climbing in the Andes, her face clouded over. You know how that sometimes happens? It’s as if a dark shadow has come over somebody. She stopped mid-sentence, as if she’d remembered something.”
Jamie was silent. They were sitting off to the side, away from the light, and for a moment it was as if they were completely alone in the room, rather than in a restaurant in which there were other diners, movement, warmth.
Isabel continued. “Then she said something very strange. She said that he was troubled in spirit. Those were her exact words. Troubled in spirit. I asked her why this was, but she didn’t answer me. She said that he wanted to come to one of the meetings, but hadn’t got round to it. She said that it was a pity, because it helped to talk to the one on the other side. Again, those were her actual words. The one on the other side.”
Jamie took a sip of his wine. “He’s lost somebody? Lots of the people at that meeting had lost somebody, I think. That’s why they go there.”
Isabel nodded. She had seen it at the previous meeting. “But who? Somebody he’s wronged, do you think?”
“Maybe.”
Isabel looked over Jamie’s shoulder. The waiter was approaching their table, plates balanced expertly in either hand. “If you had let somebody down badly and then … before you made your peace, they crossed over to the other side, as Grace would say, wouldn’t you want to speak to him?”
The waiter put the plates before them. The scallops, fresh and firm, had been arranged to make a peninsula across a shallow lake of sauce. Isabel sniffed at the steam rising from the plate. “If I had to give up everything,” she said, “seafood would be the last thing to go. I’d have a final scallop and say, ‘That’s it, that’s eating over.’ And then I’d cross over happy.”
Jamie laughed. He raised his glass to Isabel. “May that never be necessary.”
She had not been serious, of course, but the absurd, the fanciful, may bring grave thoughts in its wake. She and Jamie would not be together for eternity; one day one of them would leave or die—those were the only two certainties—and the other would be on his or her own. It was a thought that crossed the mind of everybody who ever entered into a relationship with another. It applied as much to friends as to lovers and spouses: one day somebody would see the other for the last time, and probably not know it. And there would be things left unsaid, little gestures—kindnesses—left undone, as there are in every part of life.
Jamie tackled a scallop, and then dabbed at his mouth with the starched table napkin. Isabel watched him. Napery, she thought: the word for table linen. Napery—the word had such a solid ring to it, suggesting houses that had drawers and trunks full of tablecloths and the like, neatly pressed and folded away, like old memories; napery and silver and plenishings—words that lawyers used when itemising the household effects of clients who had died and left such things behind them.
“What are you thinking of?” asked Jamie, putting down the napkin.
“Household effects,” she said. “That table napkin …” She pointed, and he looked at it in puzzlement.
“Nothing wrong with it.”
“No, of course not. I was just thinking of how we fill our houses with things. Rather too many things, in most cases.”
Jamie shrugged. “I don’t. My flat’s uncluttered. Or was … when I last visited it.”
She caught his smile, and returned it. Jamie only used his flat now to teach in, his pupils hauling their bassoon cases up the stone staircase to tug at his antiquated brass bell-pull and wipe their feet on the coir doormat with its Welcome legend and ingrained mud. He still used one room there as a bedroom, in the sense that there was a made-up bed in it, but he never stayed there now, and the flat had a cold, rather desolate feel to it. Charlie did not like it, and had fidgeted and fretted when Jamie had last taken him there.
“Your flat …,” Isabel began, but did not finish the sentence. Space, she reminded herself.
“Yes? My flat?”
Isabel waved a hand in the air, carelessly. “Your flat is your flat,” she said. “You like it—that’s all that matters.”
Jamie frowned. “But I don’t really like it,” he said.
She was surprised; he had never said this before. She wondered whether he wanted to get rid of it; he could teach just as easily in the music room in her house, and they were engaged, after all, and would be getting married in due course.
“Is there any point in keeping it, then? Do you want to sell it?”
Jamie looked away. She saw how the light accentuated his high cheekbones. She wanted to reach out and touch him; to put her hand against his cheek, which felt so smooth, and which she had become accustomed to touching, briefly, when she awoke and he was there beside her, his head on the pillow. How long would this beauty last? Five more years? Ten? Or was it more fleeting than that, as human beauty inevitably is?
She asked him again. “How about selling it? Wouldn’t you feel less … tied down?”
“I might,” said Jamie thoughtfully. “Do you think I should?”
She hesitated. “When we’re married, do we need it?” Space, she thought again.
“No, I don’t see why we should keep it.” He looked back at her. “Can we get married soon? I mean, really soon.”
She felt her heart beating within her. She closed her eyes, involuntarily. “Yes. I think we should.”
“In two or three weeks’ time?”
She felt her breath leave her; she had to force herself to breathe. “I think so.”
“I don’t want a great big wedding,” he said. “Do you mind? Something more or less private. You, me, Charlie.”
“If that’s what you want. Are you sure?”
He nodded, and reached across the table to take her hand. “Yes, it is.”
They had much to talk about. They would go to Old St. Paul’s, an Episcopal church where Isabel knew one of the clergy. There was a side chapel there—a tiny place—that would be suitable for a small wedding. The choir, though, might be asked to sing. Would Jamie object to that? He would love it, he said. They would be off to one side, out of sight, but it would be lovely hearing them in the background.