Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05 by The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday Page B

depressed,” she said. “Has he seen a doctor?”
    â€œHe won’t,” Stella replied. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything.”
    â€œAll right,” said Isabel. “Give me a week. Maybe ten days. Then telephone.”
    Stella reached out and briefly held Isabel’s arm. “You’re a saint,” she said.
    The compliment surprised Isabel. She did not conceive of herself in those terms at all; it simply would never have occurred to her to do so. A saint with a young boyfriend, she thought. And a taste for New Zealand white wine. And a tendency to think uncharitable thoughts about people like Dove and Lettuce. That sort of saint.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    P EOPLE DON’T REALISE IT,” Cat had said. “They don’t realise what running your own business is like. It’s always there. Day in, day out. And you can’t get away when you like. You’re tied down.”
    â€œLike having a baby,” said Isabel.
    She had not intended to make the comparison, but it had slipped out. And it occurred to her that even if this was true for most women who had babies, it was hardly true for her, with her resources, with Grace to support her. If tact required that one should not complain about those respects in which one is better off than others, it also required that one should not complain about things that others did not have at all—such as children. Isabel was unsure about how Cat felt about not having a child herself, even if she had a boyfriend now—“the one after the last” as Grace had called him.
    The last had been an apprentice stonemason, although Isabel still thought of him as a bouncer, the job he had been doing before he started to work with stone. He had the physique of a bouncer—and the physiognomy, too, including a protruding jaw that must have been such a tempting target for those whom he was called to expel from the noisy, subterranean club in Lothian Road that had employed him. Isabel had met him a couple of times and had suppressed the urge to stare at him in a way which would have revealed her astonishment that such a man should be the choice of her niece, as if Cat’s choices said anything about Isabel—of course they did not, she told herself, but still…
    Of course she knew exactly what it was that attracted Cat. It was the same thing that she had seen in Toby, her skiing wine-dealer boyfriend; that she had seen in the one who followed him—the one to whom Isabel had never been introduced but whom Isabel had spotted her with, arm in arm, walking along George Street one Saturday; and that she had seen in Christopher Dove—Dove of all people!—when she had had that brief flirtation with him. Cat was attracted by tall, well-built men; it was as simple as that.
    It may have been simple, but Isabel thought that it was also incomprehensible. She understood that everyone had their preferred physical type, but she found it odd that this could be the sole factor in somebody’s choice. One may find the combination of dark hair and blue eyes, for example, a heart-stopping one, but would one want to spend time in the company of dark-haired, blue-eyed people who had nothing to say, or, if they had something to say, it was trite or even distasteful? She thought not. The problem was that the search for beauty was something that we were destined to conduct, in spite of ourselves; we wanted to be in the presence of beauty because somehow we felt it rubbed off on us, enriched our lives, made us more attractive. This was felt even by those who themselves were attractive; beauty sought beauty. Cat was tall and attractive, and clearly wanted tall and attractive men; that the men she found were empty vessels had not deterred her at all. But none of them had lasted, thought Isabel, which showed that the consolations of beauty were not long-lasting: there had to be something else.
    Cat was talking to her, and had said