When she arrived at the delicatessen there were only two customers, one at the counter, being served by Eddie, the other seated at one of the coffee tables, a newspaper open in front of him and a steaming cappuccino beside it. Isabel nodded to Eddie, who smiled at her and made a sipping motion with a hand. Would she like coffee? She nodded and made her way across the shop towards the half-open door of Cat’s office.
Cat was at her desk, carefully removing the sticking tape from round the top of a tin of sugared almonds. She glanced up when Isabel appeared.
“These have passed their sell-by date,” she said. “But I’m sure that they’re fine. I’m just checking.”
Isabel said nothing. She did not approve, but said nothing.
“Eddie is going to make me a cappuccino,” she said. “Will you join me?”
Cat struggled with the tape, which kept sticking to her fingers. “What’s it like out there?” she asked.
“Not very busy,” said Isabel. “Rather quiet, in fact. We were pretty busy last Saturday.”
“Eddie told me,” said Cat. “And thank you. I gather you were both worked pretty hard.”
Isabel was about to say something, but did not. She had been about to say, “And all for no pay!” But she thought, correctly, it would not help. She did not need the money, which is what Cat would think. So she said nothing.
Cat joined her at the table a few minutes later as Eddie brought them both their coffee. Eddie smiled at Isabel again.
“How’s…” Isabel wanted to ask after Eddie’s girlfriend, but found that she could not remember her name. In fact, she thought that Eddie had never told her, and she could hardly say, How’s that girl in black? or How’s that girl with the piercings?
“Virginia?” volunteered Eddie.
It seemed an inappropriate name to Isabel, but she nodded.
“History,” said Eddie. And smiled.
Both Isabel and Cat were taken aback. Cat glanced at Isabel, an eyebrow raised. “It’s over?” she asked.
“Yup,” said Eddie. “She’s history.”
“You don’t seem too upset,” Isabel ventured.
“Cried my eyes out,” Eddie replied. “For an hour maybe. Not anymore.”
He left them. Cat smiled. “It’s different,” she whispered. “It’s just different.”
“He seems pleased,” said Isabel.
“Of course he’ll be pleased,” Cat snapped. “They’re not into commitment, his age group.”
Isabel sipped at her cappuccino. Cat was hardly one to talk about commitment, she thought, with her record.
“Have you started to look for your new manager yet?” she asked.
Cat looked out of the window. “No. In fact, I don’t think I will.”
Isabel hesitated.
“There’s a change of plan,” said Cat. “I’ve decided not to go out to Sri Lanka.”
“Not at all?”
“Well, I might visit it again sometime. I liked it. But not for a while.”
Isabel was not sure whether she should ask the question she was burning to ask. Simon. Cat looked at her astutely; the question did not need to be asked.
“Simon and I have parted company,” she said. “It didn’t work. Long-distance relationships…”
Isabel reached out and touched Cat. “I’m sorry.” She was. Cat needed love and affection and got instead passing and unsatisfactory romance, time after time. But it was her fault—if fault came into it. She looked in the wrong place, for the wrong men, and applied the wrong criteria. That sort of thing, of course, was very rarely something for which a person could be blamed. It was a character defect of the sort which we can rarely do anything about. In sexual matters, we dance to a tune which was composed for us a long time ago, by somebody else, by our parents perhaps, or by biology. Cat’s father, Isabel’s brother, was a remote, handsome man. Every single one of Cat’s boyfriends had struck Isabel as being in some way remote. And every one of them was good-looking in a particular way—the way of Isabel’s brother at that age. Simon, she was sure, would have been like that.
She suddenly asked: “You don’t have a photograph of him, do you?”
Cat looked at her in astonishment. “Why?”
“I’m curious. That’s all. I’ve seen most of your boyfriends. But not him.”
Cat shrugged. “I’ve got some photos from Sri Lanka in the office. He’ll be in some of them.”
“Please let me see.”
“I suppose so. If you really want to.”
She rose and disappeared into her office, to reappear a few minutes later with a small folder of photographs. “Look at the shots of Galle,” she said. “It’ll make you want to go there.”
Isabel opened the folder and took out the photographs. On the top was a picture of a small island, just a few yards out to sea. The island was topped by a white villa, a tattered flag flying limply from the high point of its roof.
Cat looked over Isabel’s shoulder. “Taprobane Island,” she said. “We went there for lunch with a friend. He lives there. It’s the most wonderful place.”
“And here?” asked Isabel.
There was a group of ten or twelve people on a beach. A highly coloured fishing boat was drawn up on the sand behind them. “That was farther down the coast. We went there before we went to a tea plantation—the place I bought that white tea that I gave you. Have you tried it yet?”
“Not yet,” muttered Isabel. She was looking at the group of people. Cat was there, and she was standing next to a man, who had an arm around her. But even without that, Isabel could tell.
“That’s him, isn’t it? That’s Simon?”
Cat glanced at the photograph, and looked away again quickly. “Yes.”
“He’s…so good-looking.” She spoke quietly. “And he looks so like my brother. Your father. Isn’t that strange?”
She said nothing else, but moved on to the next photograph. The tea estate. “That was where they dried the tea. Over there,” said Cat. “And do you see that man? That one? He showed us round. Tea was his life.”
But she spoke as one who was thinking of something else. Isabel could tell that, and she wondered whether she had planted the seed of something that might help Cat; she hoped that she had. Some women searched for their fathers; some men searched for their mothers. Sometimes it was better to search for neither. But she could never tell Cat that; not directly.
SHE HAD a few purchases to make in Bruntsfield, and she went directly from the delicatessen to the fish shop at Holy Corner. She wanted langoustines, and she was pleased to see that there were some, neatly arranged on a marble slab in the window, along with squid and wild salmon. While the fishmonger selected them for her, placing them on a piece of greaseproof paper, she asked him about how they differed from crayfish. “Langoustine are saltwater decapods,” he said. “Decapods. Nice word, isn’t it, Isabel? And crayfish, which are crawfish over the pond, are freshwater decapods. But…if you’re in France, then prawns are called langoustines. As an act of charity towards the humble prawns, I think. To promote them a bit.”
It was an entirely satisfactory conversation. Isabel liked talking to people who knew their subject, and the fishmonger knew all about fish. Many people in shops did not know what they were talking about, she thought. They just sold things; the fishmonger, and people like him, believed in things.