She returned to the menu, eager now to shut out their conversation. But fortunately Cat arrived at that moment and she could put the menu aside and give her attention to her niece.
“I’m late,” said Cat, breathlessly. “We had a bit of a crisis.
Somebody brought in some salmon which was way beyond its sell-by date. They said they had bought it from us, which was probably true. I don’t know how it happened. And then they went on about complaining to the hygiene people. You know what that involves. They make the most enormous fuss.”
Isabel was sympathetic. She knew that Cat would never deliberately take risks. “Did you sort it out?”
“A free bottle of champagne helped,” said Cat. “And an apology.”
Cat picked up the menu, glanced at it, and then replaced it 6 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h in its stand. She had little appetite at lunch, and would be happy with a minimalist salad. Isabel thought that this might have something to do with working with food all the time.
They exchanged a few scraps of news. Toby was away on a wine-buying trip with his father, but had telephoned the previous evening from Bordeaux. He would be back in a few days’ time, and they would be going to Perth for the weekend, where he had friends. Isabel listened politely, but could not feel enthusiastic.
What would they do on their weekend in Perth, she wondered, or was that a naïve question? It was hard to put yourself back to your early twenties.
Cat was watching her. “You should give him a chance,” she said quietly. “He’s a nice person. He really is.”
“Of course he is,” said Isabel quickly. “Of course he is. I’ve got nothing against Toby.”
Cat smiled. “You’re very unconvincing when you’re telling lies,” she said. “It’s quite apparent you don’t like him. You can’t help showing it.”
Isabel felt trapped, and thought: I’m an unconvincing hypocrite. There was silence now at the table of students, and she was aware of the fact that they were listening to the conversation.
She stared at them, noticing that one of the boys had a small pin in his ear. People who had metal piercing in their heads were asking for trouble, Grace had once said. Isabel had asked why this should be so. Hadn’t people always worn earrings, and got away with it? Grace had replied that metal piercings attracted light-ning, and that she had read of a heavily pierced man who had been struck dead in an electric storm while those around him, unpierced, had survived.
The students exchanged glances, and Isabel turned away. “This is not the place to discuss it, Cat,” she said, her voice lowered.
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“Maybe not. But it does upset me. I only want you to try with him. Try to get beyond your initial reaction.”
“My initial reaction was not entirely negative,” whispered Isabel. “I may not have felt particularly warm towards him, but that’s just because he’s not really my type. That’s all.”
“Why isn’t he your type?” asked Cat defensively, her voice raised. “What’s wrong with him?”
Isabel glanced at the students, who were now smiling. She deserved to be eavesdropped upon, she reflected; your acts will be returned to you, faithfully, every one.
“I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with him,” she began.
“It’s just that, are you sure that he’s quite . . . quite your intellectual equal? That can matter a lot, you know.”
Cat frowned, and Isabel wondered whether she had gone too far. “He’s not stupid,” Cat said indignantly. “He has a degree from St. Andrews, remember. And he’s seen a bit of the world.”
St. Andrews! Isabel was just about to say, “Well, there you are: St. Andrews,” but thought better of it. St. Andrews had a reputation of attracting well-off young people who came from the upper echelons of society and who wanted to find somewhere congenial to spend a few years while they attended parties. The Americans called such places party schools. In this case, it was an unfair reputation, as many reputations were, but there was at least a mod-icum of truth in it. Toby would have fitted very well into that social vision of St. Andrews, but it would have been unkind to point that out, and, anyway, now she wanted the conversation to stop. It had not been her intention to become embroiled in an argument about Toby; she did not think it right to interfere, and she must stop herself from drifting into a confrontation with Cat. This would make it more awkward in the future. Besides, he would go off with somebody else before too long and that would be that. Unless—
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and here was another appalling thought—unless Toby was interested in Cat for her money.
Isabel tended not to think a great deal about money, a position of privilege, as she well recognised. She and her brother had each inherited from their mother a half share in the Louisiana and Gulf Land Company, and this had left them wealthy by any standards. Isabel was discreet about this, and used her money carefully in respect of herself and generously in respect of others.
But the good that she did was done by stealth.
On Cat’s twenty-first birthday Isabel’s brother had trans-ferred enough to his daughter to allow her to buy a flat and, later, the delicatessen. There was not much left over from that—a wise policy on his part, thought Isabel—but Cat was extremely well off by the standards of her age group, most of whom would be struggling to save the deposit on a flat. Edinburgh was expensive, and thus was out of reach for many.
Toby, of course, came from a well-off background, but his family’s money was probably tied up in the business and he was likely not paid much of a salary by his father. Such young men knew exactly how important money was, and they had a talent for sniffing it out. That meant that he might be very interested in the assets which Cat had at her disposal, although Isabel could never make such a suggestion openly. If only she could find some evidence of it, and prove it, as in the denouement of some dreadful drawing-room melodrama, but that would be highly unlikely.
She reached across to reassure Cat as she changed the subject.
“He’s perfectly all right,” she said. “I’ll make an effort, and I’m sure that I’ll see his good points. It’s my fault for being too . . . too fixed in my views. I’m sorry.”
Cat appeared mollified, and Isabel steered the conversation to an account of her meeting with Paul Hogg. She had decided, T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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on her way to the bistro, what she would do about that, and now she explained it to Cat.
“I’ve tried to forget what I saw,” she explained. “It hasn’t worked. I still think about it, and then that conversation I had with Paul Hogg last night really disturbed me. Something odd happened that night at the Usher Hall. I don’t think that it was an accident. I really don’t.”
Cat was looked at her dubiously. “I hope you aren’t going to get involved,” she said. “You’ve done this before. You’ve got involved in things that are really none of your business. I really don’t think you should do that again.”
Cat was aware of the fact that there was no point in upbraid-ing Isabeclass="underline" she would never change. There was no reason why she should become involved in the affairs of others, but she seemed to be irresistibly drawn into them. And every time that she did it, it was because she imagined that there was a moral claim on her.
This view of the world, with a seemingly endless supply of potential claims, meant that anybody with a problem could arrive on Isabel’s doorstep and be taken up, simply because the require-ment of moral proximity—or her understanding of moral proximity—had been satisfied.