DAMP, CLAD IN TOWELS, they left the bathroom and went back into the bedroom. Through the window the evening sun, even at eight, slanted across the cover of their bed, a white Ulster cambric. She loved cambric: Tell her to make me a cambric shirt / Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme / Without no seam nor needlework / And then she’ll be a true love of mine. She had sung this to Charlie once and he had watched her studiously, his eyes wide, although the words must have meant nothing to him.
Jamie stood in the middle of the room, the towel about his waist. “I forgot to wash my hair,” he said. “I was going to …”
He was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Isabel glanced at him. “Should we bother?” she asked.
“No, we should. You never know.” At odd times Jamie received requests to play; this could be one.
He went to the bedside table on which the telephone stood and picked up the receiver.
He answered a question she could not hear. “Yes.”
Across the room, Isabel heard the sound of a distant voice.
Jamie lowered his voice. “No. I can’t.”
Isabel turned away.
“I told you, I can’t. I just can’t.”
Isabel turned round. He was holding the handset in an odd way, half cupping the top against his ear, as if to muffle the voice at the other end. But she had heard. Their eyes met.
“Look, we can’t talk. I’ll … I’ll speak to you some other time. Tomorrow.” A pause while something else was said, something that elicited a heated response. “I didn’t. I did not say that. Sorry, but I have to go. Goodbye.”
Isabel stood quite still. She heard her heart beating hard within her; her breathing was shallow. “Who was that?” She knew, of course, but still she asked.
Jamie moved away from the telephone. “That girl.”
“I thought so.”
“I told her not to phone me. I told her.”
Isabel felt her cheeks burning. “She’s phoned you before? Here at the house? Our house?”
Jamie sighed. “I told her.” He made a gesture of helplessness. “What can I do? She’s pursuing me.” He paused. “She told me that she was feeling weak. She wanted me to come round to her flat.”
“This evening? Right now?”
He nodded miserably.
“Right,” said Isabel. “I’m going to have a word with her. I’m going to go there right now. Right now.”
“Do you think …”
She brushed him aside. “We have to sort this out, Jamie. I know you don’t want to do it. You’re … you’re far too kind. And anyway, she’s not listening to you. Perhaps she’ll listen to me. Women have a way of conveying this sort of information to one another.” Yes, she thought—we do. And she remembered a fight she had once witnessed when walking past a bar in Tollcross years ago: two women had come tumbling out, tearing at one another’s hair, scratching at each other like cats, and one had been screaming, “Cow! Cow! He’s mine, you cow!” She remembered how shocked passersby had been, or most of them: one, a young boy, had shouted out his delighted encouragement until his mother put a hand across his mouth.
“She’s dying,” said Jamie quietly.
“We all are,” snapped Isabel. “Ultimately, we all are. So dying is no excuse. Not for this.”
She was about to add something, and almost did. She was about to tell him about her bizarre idea that charity required of her that she share him, but she did not. She was ashamed that she had even thought it, and she would keep it to herself. Now she was angry too, and that feeling was even more inappropriate. This girl, with her astonishing gall in telephoning Jamie at home, did not deserve such concern. She deserved what Isabel was going to give her: an unambiguous warning.
She dressed quickly. Jamie said something about being gentle with Prue, but Isabel barely took it in. She asked him the address, and he gave it to her. “It’s in Stockbridge,” he said. “Leslie Place. It’s that narrow street that goes up to St. Bernard’s Crescent.” He gave her the number. He did not have to look it up, and she wanted to ask him whether he had been there before. Had he said anything about that? Then she remembered that he had.
“I don’t expect I’m going to be long,” she said. “Can you wait for dinner?”
He could. “I’ll cook something,” he offered. “I’ll wait for you to come back.” His voice sounded flat.
She moved towards him. She was clothed now; he was still wearing his towel. There were goosebumps on his shoulders when she embraced him. She did not want to go; she wanted to stay with him. She wanted to lie down with him and forget about this girl, and about everything, really: about being the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, about being a person to whom others came for help, about being one of whom material charity was expected. She wanted to forget all that and think only of the fact that she was a woman singularly blessed with a beautiful young lover who wanted to marry her, and who could play the bassoon, and loved their son and …
“I have to go and speak to her. You realise that, don’t you?”
He nodded silently.
“Sometimes,” she went on, “the only way of stopping a mess becoming more of a mess is to … gird up your metaphors and lance the boil.”
They laughed together, the tension disappearing.
“A mixed metaphor never harmed anybody,” he said.
“Don’t you believe it.”
SHE WALKED DOWN LESLIE PLACE, looking up at the numbers painted on the stone above the doors. With one or two exceptions, the doors here led to what were called common stairs—a stone stairway shared by a number of flats that gave off each landing of the four-storey tenement. The flats themselves varied: most of them were spacious enough; others, tucked in almost as an afterthought, consisted of no more than a bedroom and a living room that doubled up as a kitchen. In the nineteenth century, when they were built, even such cramped accommodation would have housed an entire family, that of some struggling clerk, perhaps, battling its way up from more modest housing in a less favoured part of the city. Some of the stairways had now been done up, with new stone treads and refurbished banisters; others remained dowdy, with crumbling plaster where generations of careless removal men had allowed wardrobes to collide with walls, and smelling vaguely of cat.
Prue’s flat was up one flight of stairs. The door seemed freshly painted, a lilac colour in contrast to the black of the other two doors off her landing. A small card had been pinned to the door with the name—P. L. McKay—written on it, and underneath: Mail for Thompson and Edwards. In pencil, somebody had written alongside the name Edwards: Owes me ten quid. Although she was feeling tense, Isabel allowed herself a smile.
She drew in her breath. She could see from light coming through the fanlight above the door that there was somebody within, which would be Prue, as she had only recently made the telephone call. Thompson and Edwards only received their mail there; they would not be in. And Edwards, of course, would be keeping his head down.
She rang the bell, which had an old-fashioned wire pull. Inside there came a muffled clanking sound.
Prue opened the door. She was a young woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in a pair of jeans and a red-flecked sweater. She wore no shoes.
Isabel said, “You’re Prue?”
Prue’s lip quivered. Isabel saw this. She knows who I am.
“I’m Isabel Dalhousie.”
Prue took a step back. It was not a planned movement, Isabel thought, and for a moment she was worried that the other woman was going to faint.