a totally cool teacher.’
Cat shrugged. ‘I suppose. But I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I’m not academic like James.’
‘Oh, something will turn up. You could always get a job as a chalet girl over the winter while you decide.’
‘What about you?’ Cat was eager to turn the talk away from her lack of prospects, a subject that had begun increasingly to dismay her.
‘Camden School for Girls,’ Bella intoned as if she were revealing she’d spent her youth in a penal institution. ‘Ma spent all the money sending our brother Johnny to a classy boarding school so there was nothing left for us girls. I’ve left now, though.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘I help out in the business. I’m learning as I go. It can be fun sometimes, but mostly it’s pretty boring and Ma can’t afford to pay me much, so it’s a bit of a dead end. I need to find me a man to pamper me.’
Before Cat could comment on this novel idea, they were overtaken by the weather. Although it had stayed fair for the outdoors performance, they felt a few drops of rain and took refuge inside the humid shelter of the glass and sandstone Palm House.
‘It’s like the tropics in here,’ Cat exclaimed. ‘I read this novel last year, it was, like, a prequel to Jane Eyre, you know? It was kind of the story of the madwoman in the attic?’ In spite of Bella’s blank look, she pressed on. ‘Anyway, it’s really atmospheric, you feel like you’re in the Caribbean yourself. And this—’ She spread her arms wide. ‘This is what it felt like.’
‘I wouldn’t mind being in the Caribbean myself, if I could be with Jamie.’
Cat still couldn’t get used to thinking of her brother as ‘Jamie’. It didn’t fit him at all. ‘I imagine he’d be quite good at knocking coconuts out of trees,’ she conceded.
‘I bet he goes totes brown in the sun, he’s got that kind of skin,’ Bella mused.
‘We all do,’ Cat said. ‘My mum says it’s because we all ran around half-naked like savages when we were small.’ She spun round on the balls of her feet, peering between dripping fronds and sheltering leaves, half-convinced that Henry Tilney must be somewhere nearby. ‘I really thought Henry would be here,’ she said wistfully.
‘If he was a zombie like in the play, he’d be lurking in some graveyard eating the dead,’ Bella said, dropping her voice to spooky depths.
Cat laughed. ‘I think I’d have noticed if he was one of the undead. They’re a bit obvious, Bella. But if he was a vampire …’ Her voice tailed off.
‘Oh yeah, if this was, like, a Twilight movie, he’d have to hide indoors on a sunny day like this.’ She gave Cat a gentle poke in the arm. ‘That’s it, he’s a vampire. That’s why he’s not around this evening. It’s way too bright for him to be outside.’
Cat giggled. It was a preposterous notion, but nevertheless it was the kind of absurd fantasy that they could have fun with. ‘And of course, yesterday was cloudy so he was able to be out in the daylight, just like in the Twilight books. And he had run all the way across town, he said. And everybody knows vampires can run really far and really fast.’
‘Was he, like, amazingly strong? Could you tell from dancing with him?’
Cat cast her mind back. It was true that Henry had manoeuvred her through the complicated dance moves with little apparent effort. She’d felt safe in his hands in spite of her clumsiness and there was no doubt that he had prevented her from violent collisions with other dancers on more than one occasion. ‘He never let me fall. I know it doesn’t sound much, but when you’re whirling round in an eightsome reel, believe me, it’s a big deal. Have you been to the Highland Ball?’
Bella rolled her eyes. ‘Only, like, every year.’
‘Then you know what it’s like. It must be quite terrifying to have a partner who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I bet people get hurt all the time.’
Bella shrugged. ‘I only dance with men who know what they’re doing. I wish Jamie was here, he’s a dreamy dancer.’
Cat frowned. She’d never seen her brother dance willingly at parties, never mind master the intricacies of Scottish country dancing. She thought Bella’s assertion a wild statement of faith in someone she knew rather less well than she supposed. ‘I guess we’ll never know,’ she said. ‘Since he’s not here.’ She sighed. ‘Do you think Henry’s gone back home? Without saying?’
‘Even if he has gone home, I bet he’ll be back soon as.’ Bella turned and took Cat’s face in her hands, gently moving it this way and that to catch the light. ‘I mean, now he’s seen how pretty you are, he won’t be able to stay away. Didn’t you say he’s a lawyer too? Maybe he knows Jamie. Maybe he can persuade Jamie to take a weekend off and come to Edinburgh? How hard can that be?’
They emerged into the evening air, relieved to be out of the humidity of the palm house. They found Martha Thorpe and Susie Allen sitting on a tartan rug sipping white wine spritzers on a grassy bank. Mr Allen was nowhere to be seen, and the women were engaged in a form of parallel monologue. Martha talked about her children and Susie about her wardrobe. Neither seemed to notice that their twin tracks had no connection; they were content to be in conversation with someone who never tried to wrench the discussion away from their favoured subjects.
Cat and Bella sat on the top of the bank, arms round their knees, leaning companionably into one another, comparing notes about the events they were most looking forward to at the Book Festival and discovering with delicious pleasure that they were of one mind on most of their selected authors.
The only surprise for Cat was that she seemed to have read much more widely than her new friend. But she supposed when you grew as old as Bella, there were more calls on your time and fewer opportunities to spend the evening on a chaise longue with a book. Certainly the Thorpes seemed to watch a great deal more television than the Morlands, whose viewing was, of financial necessity, restricted to those channels that were available free of charge. Their options were further circumscribed by their parents’ conviction that all soaps and most dramas were absurd and therefore not worth the time they demanded. Cat found little hardship in this edict, since there was always something else she would rather be doing.
But that evening in the Botanics, she luxuriated in sharing an intense conversation about the novels she inhabited in her imagination. This was entirely a novelty for Cat, since she was the only member of her family who set any store by fiction. Their views baffled her; fiction seemed to Cat to be the highest form of the writer’s art, depending as it did on the resourceful application of creativity and the necessity of direct communication with the reader.
For historians and writers of narrative non-fiction, all the building blocks of their work were already in place. They had nothing more to do than gather them and construct a pretty edifice. Conversely, the writers of fiction began with nothing other than the contents of their heads and their understanding of the human condition. They must comprehend the deepest and strangest elements of emotion and behaviour and render them accessible to those who lacked their wit and skill.
Poets, it might be argued, also relied on their own emotional and intellectual resources. But Cat had serious doubts about poets. She firmly believed that while some could thrill and excite, too many failed the fundamental test of communicating with their readers.
