He fixed her with an intense gaze. “But you implied a few moments ago that you had no idea.”
She began to move towards the door. “That was then,” she said.
“Then who was it?”
She hesitated. She did not trust this man and she could not trust him not to take his anger out on his wife.
“I choose not to tell you.”
He raised his voice almost to shouting pitch. “You choose not to tell me?”
Perhaps this is why his wife is looking elsewhere, she thought. Perhaps he needs somebody to tell him.
“That is what I said, Mr. Mackinlay. You are an arrogant man, I’m afraid. You are used to demanding that people comply with what you want of them. I shall not.”
She walked past him. She half expected him to try to stop her leaving, but he did not.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I would normally give people the information to which they are entitled, but I do not think you deserve this information. So I shall not.”
She left the room. He said nothing as she opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
Miss Carty was outside. You have been listening at the door, thought Isabel; it is quite apparent from your demeanour.
ISABEL DROVE BACK even more slowly than she had driven there. The road was quiet, and she felt calmer now as she made her way home under the wide sky of late afternoon. To her right, on the horizon, were the folds of the Lammermuir Hills, blue against blue. Between the road and the hills were rich stretches of green, squared by hedges and drystone walls that marched off into the distance.
I love this country, she thought. I love it because it is soft and green and the sky is a theatre of white and grey and is so heartbreakingly beautiful in all its moods. I love it because of its people, who are frustrating and interesting and full of joy and sorrow, in equal amounts perhaps; who plot and scheme and yet find time to love one another and make songs and music and plant rhododendrons and write poetry and talk Gaelic and catch fish. I love it for all of that.
As her car picked up speed when the road dipped down towards Flotterstone, Isabel thought about what she had done. She had been asked to find things wrong with three people with whom there was essentially not much wrong: they were simply human. But the people who had involved her in this had more substantial faults. They were schemers, she felt; schemers in a small and contained society. But then, were we not all like that, whatever circles we moved in? Were we not all concerned with our reputation? Were we not all intent on securing what we could for ourselves? Did we not all have flaws of greater or less magnitude—all of us?
She had effectively left them to their own devices, but what else could she have done? She could have said to Alex Mackinlay, “Your wife wrote that letter, you know. Your own wife.” And he would have laughed at the very idea, or reacted angrily perhaps and challenged her to justify the accusation. Which she had decided she could not do, because it would have made the whole situation messier and more difficult.
Her thoughts turned to happiness, and its only too common shadow, unhappiness. She hoped that Janet Carty would find happiness somewhere, although she doubted it. She hoped the same for Jillian, whose anguish and anxiety were so vividly attested by the letter she wrote. And poor Tom Simpson, who wanted the job but who would never get it; and John Fraser, in his grief and his guilt; and Gordon, whom she had misjudged in imagining the presence of malice when only ambition was present; and Alex Mackinlay, who was trying his best to defend the reputation of the school, but who could not help, it seemed, being a bit of a bully; and … and … Harold Slade. Isabel hesitated. It was all his fault, simpliciter. But it was never that simple. She made an effort, and eventually she thought: I wish happiness for Harold Slade too. There, I’ve thought it. I’ve thought the thing I knew I should think. And I feel better for it, because although it’s harder to love, it’s always better.
The road ahead curved slowly to the left. Off to the right, the land dipped down towards the plains of the coast, to the cone of Berwick Law and the blue haze of the North Sea. Suddenly she thought of the schoolboy with whom she had spoken; she saw his serious expression, his freckles, his green eyes, and she smiled as she sent him a mental message: Don’t worry. You may think you are in prison right at the moment, but the door will open soon enough. Remember that. It will—it really will.
BACK IN EDINBURGH, and two days later, they did not have far to go for their picnic—only a few paces, really, out on to the lawn behind the house, close to the wooden summerhouse that Isabel had decided she would soon convert into a place for Charlie to play in with his friends, when he eventually found some. There she laid a rubber-backed picnic rug on the grass—a rug in Macpherson tartan—and brought a few of Charlie’s toys to keep him entertained: an old wooden truck, green in body, with red wheels, that had belonged to her father and would not have looked out of place in a museum of childhood; his stuffed fox, who might be a familiar for their resident member of the species, Brother Fox; a vaguely sinister woollen spider, knitted by a Morningside widow and sold for charity at a bring-and-buy sale at Holy Corner. These would keep him entertained for hours, as he loaded the spider and fox into the back of the truck and then unloaded them again; interminably, it seemed; fascinated by the whole process.
“Do you think he knows that his stuffed fox is a fox?” asked Jamie, as Isabel laid out a plate of cucumber sandwiches and a neatly quartered Scotch egg pie. “Or is it just … something else?”
“I’ve been trying to see if he says ‘fo’ when he plays with it,” said Isabel. “He knows that Brother Fox is a fo, as he calls him. But I’m not sure if he knows that this is a fo.”
“Fo!” exclaimed Charlie, pointing to the bushes alongside the garden wall.
“Perhaps,” said Isabel. “He may be there. But I don’t see him, do you, Charlie?”
Isabel passed Jamie a quarter of the pie, and for Charlie she cut off an eighth. “We bank up so many resentments in our children,” she said. “As Mr. Larkin observed in that poem of his.”
“I haven’t read it,” said Jamie. “What does he say?”
Isabel waved a hand in the air. “Oh, something about how your mum and dad confuse you.”
“Confuse?”
“Well, something like that.”
Jamie looked puzzled. “Why do you mention that?”
She pointed to the tiny piece of pie. “Because here I am giving you a large slice of pie, and Charlie gets one-eighth of a pie.”
Jamie snorted. “He won’t notice. The size of one’s pie in this life depends on the size of one’s stomach. Charlie has a small stomach.”
“You’re right,” said Isabel. “He seems happy enough.” Words came to her, unbidden, unplanned. “I never wished for larger pies / A one-eighth pie was very nice / I never yearned for larger pies / My own small slice would quite suffice.”
She looked at Jamie, and they both burst out laughing.
“Don’t expect me to set that to music,” said Jamie.
“I don’t.”
They moved on to cucumber sandwiches. Above them, the sky was pale blue, empty apart from a few stately drifts of high, cotton-wool cumulus. Jamie lay back on the rug and stared up into the void; Isabel followed his gaze. They had more than enough cucumber sandwiches; they had all the elderflower cordial in the world; they had box after box of wafer-thin almond biscuits; they had everything that two people and a child could ever want.
“You’ve been busy, haven’t you?” observed Jamie. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said dreamily. “My life seems to tick over in a satisfactory way. Not much happens, I suppose. I run a philosophical review. I have a little boy. I have a hus …”