She moved a chair in the morning room so that she would be by the window. It was a clear day, and the sun was on the blossom on the apple trees which lined one edge of her walled garden.
The blossom was late this year, and she wondered whether there would be apples again this summer. Every now and then the trees became barren and produced no fruit; then, the following year, they would be laden with a proliferation of small red apples that she would pick and make into chutney and sauce according to a recipe which her mother had given her.
Her mother—her sainted American mother—had died when 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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Isabel was eleven, and the memories were fading. Months and years blurred into one another, and Isabel’s mental picture of the face that looked down at her as she was tucked into bed at night was vague now. She could hear the voice, though, echoing somewhere in her mind; that soft southern voice that her father had said reminded him of moss on trees and characters from Ten-nessee Williams plays.
Seated in the morning room with a cup of coffee, her second, on the glass-topped side table, she found herself stuck over the crossword puzzle at an inexplicably early stage. One across had been a gift, almost an insult— They have slots in the gaming indus-try (3-5-7). One-armed bandits. And then, He’s a German in control (7). Manager, of course. But after a few of this standard, she came across Excited by the score? (7) and Vulnerable we opined desultorily (4, 4), both of which remained unsolved, and ruined the rest of the puzzle. She felt frustrated, and cross with herself.
The clues would resolve themselves in due course, and come to her later in the day, but for the time being she had been defeated.
She knew, of course, what was wrong. The events of the previous night had upset her, perhaps more than she realised. She had had trouble in getting to sleep, and had awoken in the small hours of the morning, got out of bed, and gone downstairs to fetch a glass of milk. She had tried to read, but had found it difficult to concentrate, and had switched off the light and lain awake in bed, thinking about the boy and that handsome, composed face.
Would she have felt differently if it had been somebody older?
Would there have been the same poignancy had the lolling head been grey, the face lined with age rather than youthful?
A night of interrupted sleep, and a shock like that—it was small wonder that she could not manage these obvious clues. She tossed the newspaper down and rose to her feet. She wanted to 1 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h talk to somebody, to discuss what had happened last night. There was no point in discussing it further with Grace, who would only engage in unlikely speculation and would wander off into long stories about disasters which she had heard about from friends. If urban myths had to start somewhere, Isabel thought that they might begin with Grace. She would walk to Bruntsfield, she decided, and speak to her niece, Cat. Cat owned a delicatessen on a busy corner in the popular shopping area, and provided that there were not too many customers, she would usually take time off to drink a cup of coffee with her aunt.
Cat was sympathetic, and if Isabel ever needed to set things in perspective, her niece would be her first port of call. And it was the same for Cat. When she had difficulties with boyfriends—
and such difficulties seemed to be a constant feature of her life—
that was the subject of exchanges between the two of them.
“Of course, you know what I’m going to tell you,” Isabel had said to her six months before, just before the arrival of Toby.
“And you know what I’ll say back to you.”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “I suppose I do. And I know that I shouldn’t say this, because we shouldn’t tell others what to do. But—”
“But you think I should go back to Jamie?”
“Precisely,” said Isabel, thinking of Jamie, with that lovely grin of his and his fine tenor voice.
“Yes, Isabel, but you know, don’t you? You know that I don’t love him. I just don’t.”
There was no answer to that, and the conversation had ended in silence.
S H E F E T C H E D H E R COAT, calling out to Grace that she was going out and would not be back for lunch. She was not sure 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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whether Grace heard—there was the whine of a vacuum cleaner from somewhere within the house—and she called out again.
This time the vacuum cleaner was switched off and there was a response.
“Don’t make lunch,” Isabel called. “I’m not very hungry.”
Cat was busy when Isabel arrived at the delicatessen. There were several customers in the shop, two busying themselves with the choice of a bottle of wine, pointing at labels and discussing the merits of Brunello over Chianti, while Cat was allowing another to sample a sliver of cheese from a large block of pecorino on a mar-ble slab. She caught Isabel’s eye and smiled, mouthing a greeting.
Isabel pointed to one of the tables at which Cat served her customers coffee; she would wait there until the customers had left.
There were continental newspapers and magazines neatly stacked beside the table and she picked up a two-day-old copy of Corriere della Sera. She read Italian, as did Cat, and skipping the pages devoted to Italian politics—which she found impenetrable—she turned to the arts pages. There was a lengthy reevalua-tion of Calvino and a short article on the forthcoming season at La Scala. She decided that neither interested her: she knew none of the singers referred to in the headline to the La Scala article, and Calvino, in her view, needed no reassessment. That left a piece on an Albanian filmmaker who had become established in Rome and who was attempting to make films about his native country. It turned out to be a thoughtful read: there had been no cameras in Hoxha’s Albania, apparently—only those owned by the security police for the purpose of photographing suspects. It was not until he was thirty, the director revealed, that he had managed to get his hands on any photographic apparatus. I was trembling, he said. I thought I might drop it.
Isabel finished the article and put down the newspaper. Poor 2 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h man. All those years which had been wasted. Whole lifetimes had been spent in oppression and the denial of opportunities.
Even if people knew, or suspected, that it would come to an end, many must have imagined that it would be too late for them.
Would it help to know that one’s children might have what one was not allowed to taste for oneself ? She looked at Cat. Cat, who was twenty-four, had never really known what it was like when half the world—or so it seemed—had been unable to talk to the other half. She had been a young girl when the Berlin Wall came down, and Stalin, and Hitler, and all the other tyrants were distant historical figures to her, almost as remote as the Borgias.
Who were her bogeymen? she wondered. Who, if anyone, would really terrify her generation? A few days earlier she had heard somebody on the radio say that children should be taught that there are no evil people and that evil was just that which people did. The observation had arrested her: she was standing in the kitchen when she heard it, and she stopped exactly where she stood, and watched the leaves of a tree move against the sky outside. There are no evil people. Had he actually said that? There were always people who were prepared to say that sort of thing, just to show that they were not old-fashioned. Well, she suspected that one would not hear such a comment from this man from Albania, who had lived with evil about him like the four walls of a prison.