T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
E
B O O K S B Y A L E X A N D E R M C C A L L S M I T H
The Girl Who Married a Lion
and Other Tales from Africa
I N T H E N O . 1 L A D I E S ’ D E T E C T I V E A G E N C Y S E R I E S
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
T H E S U N D A Y
P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
E
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h p a n t h e o n b o o k s
n e w y o r k
Copyright © 2004 by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Published simultaneously in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf, Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn, Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2004.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCall Smith, Alexander, [date]
The Sunday philosophy club / Alexander McCall Smith p. cm.
eISBN 0-375-42343-5
1. Stockbrokers—Crimes against—Fiction.
2. Edinburgh (Scotland)—
Fiction. 3. Women editors—Fiction. 4. Housekeepers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C326S86 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004044546
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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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C H A P T E R O N E
E
ISABEL DALHOUSIE saw the young man fall from the edge of the upper circle, from the gods. His flight was so sudden and short, and it was for less than a second that she saw him, hair tousled, upside down, his shirt and jacket up around his chest so that his midriff was exposed. And then, striking the edge of the grand circle, he disappeared headfirst towards the stalls below.
Her first thought, curiously, was of Auden’s poem on the fall of Icarus. Such events, said Auden, occur against a background of people going about their ordinary business. They do not look up and see the boy falling from the sky. I was talking to a friend, she thought. I was talking to a friend and the boy fell out of the sky.
She would have remembered the evening, even if this had not happened. She had been dubious about the concert—a performance by the Reykjavik Symphony, of which she had never heard—and would not have gone had not a spare ticket been pressed upon her by a neighbour. Did Reykjavik really have a professional symphony orchestra, she wondered, or were the players amateurs? Of course, even if they were, if they had come as far as Edinburgh to give a late spring concert, then they deserved an audience; they could not be allowed to come all the way from 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Iceland and then perform to an empty hall. And so she had gone to the concert and had sat through a first half which comprised a romantic combination of German and Scottish: Mahler, Schu-bert, and Hamish McCunn.
It was a warm evening—unseasonably so for late March—
and the atmosphere in the Usher Hall was close. She had come lightly dressed, as a precaution, and was glad that she had done so as the temperature in the grand circle inevitably climbed too high. During the interval she had made her way downstairs and had enjoyed the relief of the cooler air outside, eschewing the crush of the bar with its cacophony of conversation. She would find people she knew there, of course; it was impossible to go out in Edinburgh and not see anybody, but she was not in the mood for conversation that evening. When the time came to go back in, she toyed for a few moments with the idea of missing the second half, but she always felt inhibited from any act suggesting a lack of concentration or, worse still, of seriousness. So she had returned to her seat, picked up the programme from where she had left it on the armrest next to her, and studied what lay ahead. She took a deep intake of breath. Stockhausen!
She had brought with her a set of opera glasses—so necessary even in the moderate heights of the grand circle. With these trained on the stage so far down below, she scrutinised each player one by one, an activity she could never resist in concerts.
One did not stare at people through binoculars normally, but here in the concert hall it was permitted, and if the binoculars strayed to the audience once in a while, who was to notice? The strings were unexceptional, but one of the clarinettists, she noticed, had a remarkable face: high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and a chin that had been cleaved, surely, by an axe. Her gaze dwelt on him, 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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and she thought of the generations of hardy Icelanders, and Danes before them, that had laboured to bring forth this type: men and women who scratched a living from the thin soil of upland farms; fishermen who hunted cod in steel-grey waters; women who struggled to keep their children alive on dried fish and oatmeal; and now, at the end of all this effort, a clarinettist.
She laid aside the opera glasses and sat back in her seat. It was a perfectly competent orchestra, and they had played the McCunn with gusto, but why did people still do Stockhausen?
Perhaps it was some sort of statement of cultural sophistication.
We may come from Reykjavik, and it may be a small town far from anywhere, but we can at least play Stockhausen as well as the rest of them. She closed her eyes. It was impossible music, really, and it was not something a visiting orchestra should inflict on its hosts. For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more . . . apologetic. This suited Isabel, who disliked Wagner.
The Stockhausen was the final item on the programme. When at last the conductor had retired and the clapping had died down—
not as warm as it might have been, she thought; something to do with Stockhausen—she slipped out of her seat and made her way to the ladies’ room. She turned on a tap and scooped water into her mouth—the Usher Hall had nothing so modern as a drinking foun-tain—and then splashed some on her face. She felt cooler, and now made her way out onto the landing again. It was at this point, though, that Isabel caught sight of her friend Jennifer standing at the bottom of the short flight of stairs that led into the grand circle.
6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She hesitated. It was still uncomfortably warm inside, but she had not seen Jennifer for over a year, and she could hardly walk past without greeting her.
Isabel made her way through the crowds.
“I’m waiting for David,” Jennifer said, gesturing towards the grand circle. “He lost a contact lens, would you believe it, and one of the usherettes has lent him a torch to go and look for it under his seat. He lost one on the train through to Glasgow and now he’s done it again.”
They chatted as the last of the crowd made its way down the stairs behind them. Jennifer, a handsome woman, in her early forties—like Isabel—was wearing a red suit on which she had pinned a large gold brooch in the shape of a fox’s head. Isabel could not help but look at the fox, which had ruby eyes, and seemed to be watching her. Brother Fox, she thought. So like Brother Fox.
After a few minutes, Jennifer looked anxiously up the stairs.
“We should go and see if he needs help,” she said irritably.
“It’ll be an awful nuisance if he’s lost another one.”
They took a few steps up the short set of stairs and looked down towards the place where they could make out David’s back, hunched behind a seat, the light of the torch glinting between the seating. And it was at that moment, as they stood there, that the young man fell from the layer above—silently, wordlessly, arms flailing as if he were trying to fly, or fend off the ground—
and then disappeared from view.
F O R A B R I E F M O M E N T they stared at each other in mutual disbelief. And then, from below, there came a scream, a woman’s voice, high-pitched; and then a man shouted and a door slammed somewhere.
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 reached forward and seized Jennifer’s arm. “My God!”
she said. “My God!”
From where he had been crouching, Jennifer’s husband straightened up. “What was that?” he called to them. “What happened?”
“Somebody fell,” said Jennifer. She pointed at the upper circle, at the point where the top layer joined the wall. “From up there. He fell.”
They looked at one another again. Now Isabel moved forward to the edge of the circle. There was a brass rail running along the parapet, and she held on to this as she peered over.
Below her, slumped over the edge of a seat, his legs twisted over the arms of the neighbouring seats, one foot, she noticed, without a shoe, but stockinged, was the young man. She could not see his head, which was down below the level of the seat; but she saw an arm sticking up, as if reaching for something, but quite still. Beside him stood two men in evening dress, one of whom had reached forward and was touching him, while the other looked back towards the door.
“Quickly!” one of the men shouted. “Hurry!”
A woman called out something and a third man ran up the aisle to where the young man lay. He bent down and then began to lift the young man off the seat. Now the head came into view, and lolled, as if loosened from the body. Isabel withdrew and looked at Jennifer.
“We’ll have to go down there,” she said. “We saw what happened. We had better go and tell somebody what we saw.”
Jennifer nodded. “We didn’t see much,” she said. “It was over so quickly. Oh dear.”
Isabel saw that her friend was shaking, and she put an arm about her shoulder. “That was ghastly!” she said. “Such a shock.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jennifer closed her eyes. “He just came down . . . so quickly.
Do you think he’s still alive? Did you see?”
“I’m afraid he looked rather badly hurt,” said Isabel, thinking, It’s worse than that.
T H E Y W E N T D OW N S TA I R S . A small crowd of people had gathered round the door into the stalls, and there was a buzz of conversation. As Isabel and Jennifer drew near, a woman turned to them and said: “Somebody fell from the gods. He’s in there.”
Isabel nodded. “We saw it happen,” she said. “We were up there.”
“You saw it?” said the woman. “You actually saw it?”
“We saw him coming down,” said Jennifer. “We were in the grand circle. He came down past us.”
“How dreadful,” said the woman. “To see it . . .”
“Yes.”
The woman looked at Isabel with that sudden human intimacy that the witnessing of tragedy permitted.
“I don’t know if we should be standing here,” Isabel muttered, half to Jennifer, half to the other woman. “We’ll just get in the way.”
The other woman drew back. “One wants to do something,”
she said lamely.
“I do hope that he’s all right,” said Jennifer. “Falling all that way. He hit the edge of the circle, you know. It might have broken the fall a bit.”
No, thought Isabel, it would have made it worse, perhaps; there would be two sets of injuries, the blow from the edge of the circle and injuries on the ground. She looked behind her; there 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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was activity at the front door and then, against the wall, the flashing blue light of the ambulance outside.
“We must let them get through,” said Jennifer, moving away from the knot of people at the door. “The ambulance men will need to get in.”
They stood back as two men in loose green fatigues hurried past, carrying a folded stretcher. They were not long in coming out—less than a minute, it seemed—and then they went past, the young man laid out on the stretcher, his arms folded over his chest. Isabel turned away, anxious not to intrude, but she saw his face before she averted her gaze. She saw the halo of tousled dark hair and the fine features, undamaged. To be so beautiful, she thought, and now the end. She closed her eyes. She felt raw inside, empty. This poor young man, loved by somebody somewhere, whose world would end this evening, she thought, when the cruel news was broached. All that love invested in a future that would not materialise, ended in a second, in a fall from the gods.
She turned to Jennifer. “I’m going upstairs quickly,” she said, her voice lowered. “Tell them that we saw it. Tell them I’ll be back in a moment.”
Jennifer nodded, looking about her to see who was in charge.
There was confusion now. A woman was sobbing, one of the women who must have been standing in the stalls when he came down, and she was being comforted by a tall man in an evening jacket.
Isabel detached herself and made her way to one of the staircases that led up to the gods. She felt uneasy, and glanced behind her, but there was nobody around. She climbed up the last few stairs, through one of the archways that led to the steeply racked 1 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h seating. It was quiet, and the lights suspended from the ceiling above were dimmed in their ornate glass bowls. She looked down, to the edge over which the boy had fallen. They had been standing almost immediately below the point at which he had dropped, which enabled her to calculate where he must have been standing before he slipped.
She made her way down to the parapet and edged along the front row of seats. Here was the brass rail over which he must have been leaning before, and there, down on the ground, a programme. She bent down and picked it up; its cover, she noticed, had a slight tear, but that was all. She replaced it where she had found it. Then she bent over and looked down over the edge. He must have been sitting here, at the very end of the row, where the upper circle met the wall. Had he been further in towards the middle, he would have landed in the grand circle; only at the end of the row was there a clear drop down to the stalls.
For a moment she felt a swaying vertigo, and she closed her eyes. But then she opened them again and looked down into the stalls, a good fifty feet below. Beneath her, standing near to where the young man had landed, a man in a blue windcheater looked upwards and into her eyes. They were both surprised, and Isabel leant backwards, as if warned off by his stare.
Isabel left the edge and made her way back up the aisle between the seats. She had no idea what she had expected to find—if anything—and she felt embarrassed to have been seen by that man below. What must he have thought of her? A vulgar onlooker trying to imagine what that poor boy must have seen during his last seconds on this earth, no doubt. But that was not what she had been doing; not at all.
She reached the stairs and began to walk down, holding the 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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rail as she did so. The steps were stone, and spiral, and one might so easily slip. As he must have done, she thought. He must have looked over, perhaps to see if he could spot somebody down below, a friend maybe, and then he had lost his footing and top-pled over. It could easily happen—the parapet was low enough.
She stopped halfway down the stairs. She was alone, but she had heard something. Or had she imagined it? She strained her ears to catch a sound, but there was nothing. She took a breath.
He must have been the very last person up there, all alone, when everybody else had gone and the girl at the bar on the landing was closing up. That boy had been there himself and had looked down, and then he had fallen, silently, perhaps seeing herself and Jennifer on the way down, who would then have been his last human contact.
She reached the bottom of the stairs. The man in the blue windcheater was there, just a few yards away, and when she came out, he looked at her sternly.
Isabel walked over to him. “I saw it happen,” she said. “I was in the grand circle. My friend and I saw him fall.”
The man looked at her. “We’ll need to talk to you,” he said.
“We’ll need to take statements.”
Isabel nodded. “I saw so little,” she said. “It was over so quickly.”
He frowned. “Why were you up there just now?” he asked.
Isabel looked down at the ground. “I wanted to see how it could have happened,” she said. “And now I do see.”
“Oh?”
“He must have looked over,” she said. “Then he lost his balance. I’m sure it would not be difficult.”
The man pursed his lips. “We’ll look into that. No need to speculate.”
1 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h It was a reproach, but not a severe one, as he saw that she was upset. For she was shaking now. He was familiar with that.
Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment.
C H A P T E R T W O
E
AT NINE O’CLOCK the following morning Isabel’s housekeeper, Grace, let herself into the house, picked up the mail from the floor in the hall, and made her way into the kitchen. Isabel had come downstairs and was sitting at the table in the kitchen, the newspaper open before her, a half-finished cup of coffee at her elbow.
Grace put the letters down on the table and took off her coat.
She was a tall woman, in her very late forties, six years older than Isabel. She wore a long herringbone coat, of an old-fashioned cut, and had dark red hair which she wore in a bun at the back.
“I had to wait half an hour for a bus,” she said. “Nothing came. Nothing.”
Isabel rose to her feet and went over to the percolator of freshly made coffee on the stove.
“This will help,” she said, pouring Grace a cup. Then, as Grace took a sip, she pointed to the newspaper on the table.
“There’s a terrible thing in The Scotsman, ” she said. “An accident. I saw it last night at the Usher Hall. A young man fell all the way from the gods.”
Grace gasped. “Poor soul,” she said. “And . . .”
1 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“He died,” said Isabel. “They took him to the Infirmary, but he was declared dead when he arrived.”
Grace looked at her employer over her cup. “Did he jump?”
she asked.
Isabel shook her head. “Nobody has any reason to believe that.” She stopped. She had not thought of it at all. People did not kill themselves that way; if you wanted to jump, then you went to the Forth Bridge, or the Dean Bridge if you preferred the ground to the water. The Dean Bridge: Ruthven Todd had written a poem about that, had he not, and had said that its iron spikes “curiously repel the suicides”; curiously, because the thought of minor pain should surely mean nothing in the face of complete destruction.
Ruthven Todd, she thought, all but ignored in spite of his remarkable poetry; one line of his, she had once said, was worth fifty lines of McDiarmid, with all his posturing; but nobody remembered Ruthven Todd anymore.
She had seen McDiarmid once, when she was a schoolgirl, and had been walking with her father down Hanover Street, past Milnes Bar. The poet had come out of the bar in the company of a tall, distinguished-looking man, who had greeted her father.
Her father had introduced her to both of them, and the tall man had shaken her hand courteously; McDiarmid had smiled, and nodded, and she had been struck by his eyes, which seemed to emit a piercing blue light. He was wearing a kilt, and carrying a small, battered leather briefcase, which he hugged to his chest, as if using it to protect himself against the cold.
Afterwards her father had said: “The best poet and the wordiest poet in Scotland, both together.”
“Which was which?” she had asked. They read Burns at school, and some Ramsay and Henryson, but nothing modern.
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“McDiarmid, or Christopher Grieve, to give him his real name, is the wordiest. The best is the tall man, Norman McCaig.
But he’ll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one’s soul.” He had paused, and then asked: “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
And Isabel had said, “No.”
G R AC E A S K E D H E R AG A I N : “Do you think he jumped?”
“We did not see him actually fall over the edge,” Isabel said, folding the newspaper in such a way as to reveal the crossword.
“We saw him on the way down—after he had slipped or whatever.
I told the police that. They took a statement from me last night.”
“People don’t slip that easily,” muttered Grace.
“Yes, they do,” said Isabel. “They slip. All the time. I once read about somebody slipping on his honeymoon. The couple was visiting some falls in South America and the man slipped.”
Grace raised an eyebrow. “There was a woman who fell over the crags,” she said. “Right here in Edinburgh. She was on her honeymoon.”
“Well, there you are,” said Isabel. “Slipped.”
“Except some thought she was pushed,” countered Grace.
“The husband had taken out an insurance policy on her life a few weeks before. He claimed the money, and the insurance company refused to pay out.”
“Well, it must happen in some cases. Some people are pushed. Others slip.” She paused, imagining the young couple in South America, with the spray from the falls shooting up and the man tumbling into the white, and the young bride running back 1 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h along the path, and the emptiness. You loved another, and this made you so vulnerable; just an inch or so too close to the edge and your world could change.
She picked up her coffee and began to leave the kitchen.
Grace preferred to work unobserved, and she herself liked to do the crossword in the morning room, looking out onto the garden.
This had been the ritual for years, from the time that she had moved back into the house until now. The crossword would start the day, and then she would glance at the news itself, trying to avoid the salacious court cases which seemed to take up more and more newspaper columns. There was such an obsession with human weakness and failing; with the tragedies of peoples’ lives; with the banal affairs of actors and singers. You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seemed to her to be voyeurism, or even a form of moralistic tale telling. And yet, she thought, do I not read these things myself ? I do. I am just as bad as everybody else, drawn to these scandals. She smiled ruefully, noticing the heading: minister’s shame rocks parish. Of course she would read that, as everybody else would, although she knew that behind the story was a personal tragedy, and all the embarrassment that goes with that.
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.
She found herself gazing at the label of a bottle of olive oil which Cat had placed in a prominent position on a shelf near the table. It was painted in that nineteenth-century rural style which the Italians use to demonstrate the integrity of agricultural products. This was not from a factory, the illustration proclaimed; this was from a real farm, where women like those shown on the bottle pressed the oil from their own olives, where there were large, 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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sweet-smelling white oxen and, in the background, a mousta-chioed farmer with a hoe. These were decent people, who believed in evil, and in the Virgin, and in a whole bevy of saints. But of course they did not exist anymore, and the olive oil probably came from North Africa and was rebottled by cynical Neapolitan businessmen who only paid lip service to the Virgin, when their mothers were within earshot.
“You’re thinking,” said Cat, lowering herself into the other chair. “I can always tell when you’re thinking profound thoughts.
You look dreamy.”
Isabel smiled. “I was thinking about Italy, and evil, and topics of that nature.”
Cat wiped her hands on a cloth. “I was thinking of cheese,”
she said. “That woman sampled eight Italian cheeses and then bought a small block of farmhouse cheddar.”
“Simple tastes,” said Isabel. “You mustn’t blame her.”
“I’ve decided that I’m not too keen on the public,” said Cat.
“I’d like to have a private shop. People would have to apply for membership before they could come in. I’d have to approve them. Rather like the members of your philosophy club or whatever it is.”
“The Sunday Philosophy Club is not exactly very active,” she said to Cat. “But we’ll have a meeting one of these days.”
“It’s such a good idea,” said Cat. “I’d come, but Sunday’s a bad day for me. I can never get myself organised to do anything.
You know how it is. You know, don’t you?”
Isabel did know. This, presumably, was what afflicted the members of the club.
Cat looked at her. “Is everything all right? You look a bit low.
I can always tell, you know.”
Isabel was silent for a moment. She looked down at the pat-2 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tern on the tablecloth, and then looked back up at her niece. “No.
I suppose I’m not feeling all that cheerful. Something happened last night. I saw something terrible.”
Cat frowned, and reached across the table to place a hand on Isabel’s arm. “What happened?”
“Have you seen the paper this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see that item about the young man at the Usher Hall?”
“Yes,” said Cat. “I did.”
“I was there,” said Isabel simply. “I saw him fall from the gods, right past my eyes.”
Cat gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must have been terrible.” She paused. “I know who it was, by the way. Somebody came in this morning and told me. I knew him, vaguely.”
For a moment Isabel said nothing. She had expected no more than to tell Cat about what had happened; she had not imagined that she would know him, that poor, falling boy.
“He lived near here,” Cat went on to explain. “In Marchmont.
One of those flats right on the edge of the Meadows, I think. He came in here from time to time, but I really saw a bit more of his flatmates.”
“Who was he?” Isabel asked.
“Mark somebody or other,” Cat replied. “I was told his sur-name, but I can’t remember it. Somebody was in this morning—
she knew them better—and she told me that it had happened. I was pretty shocked—like you.”
“Them?” asked Isabel. “Was he married or . . .” She paused.
People often did not bother to marry, she had to remind herself, and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases. But how 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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did you put that particular question? Did he have a partner? But partners could be anyone, from the most temporary or recent to the wife or husband of fifty years. Perhaps one should just say: Was there somebody else? Which was sufficiently vague to cover everything.
Cat shook her head. “I don’t think so. There were two flatmates. Three of them shared. A girl and another boy. The girl’s from the west, Glasgow or somewhere, and she’s the one who comes in here. The other one I’m not sure about. Neil, I think, but I may be mixing him up.”
Cat’s assistant, a silent young man called Eddie, who always avoided eye contact, now brought them each a cup of hot milky coffee. Isabel thanked him and smiled, but he looked away and retreated to the back of the counter.
“What’s wrong with Eddie?” whispered Isabel. “He never looks at me. I’m not all that frightening, am I?”
Cat smiled. “He’s a hard worker,” she replied. “And he’s honest.”
“But he never looks at anyone.”
“There may be a reason for that,” said Cat. “I came across him the other evening, sitting in the back room, his feet on the desk. He had his head in his hands and I didn’t realise it at first, but he was in tears.”
“Why?” asked Isabel. “Did he tell you?”
Cat hesitated for a moment. “He told me something. Not very much.”
Isabel waited, but it was clear that Cat did not want to divulge what Eddie had said to her. She steered the subject back to the event of the previous night. How could he have fallen from the gods when there was that brass rail, was there not, which was intended to stop exactly that? Was it a suicide? Would somebody really jump from there? It would be a selfish way of going, surely, 2 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h as there could easily be somebody down below who could be injured, or even killed.
“It wasn’t suicide,” Isabel said firmly. “Definitely not.”
“How do you know?” asked Cat. “You said you didn’t see him actually go over the edge. How can you be so sure?”
“He came down upside down,” said Isabel, remembering the sight of the jacket and shirt pulled down by gravity and the exposed flat midriff. He was like a boy diving off a cliff, into a sea that was not there.
“So? People turn around, presumably, when they fall. Surely that means nothing.”
Isabel shook her head. “He would not have had time to do that. You must remember that he was just above us. And people don’t dive when they commit suicide. They fall feetfirst.”
Cat thought for a moment. That was probably right. Occasionally the newspaper printed pictures of people on the way down from buildings and bridges, and they tended to be falling feetfirst. But it still seemed so unlikely that anybody could fall over that parapet by mistake, unless it was lower than she remembered it. She would take a look next time she was in the Usher Hall.
They sipped at their coffee. Cat broke the silence. “You must feel awful. I remember when I saw an accident in George Street, I felt just awful myself. Just witnessing something like that is so traumatic.”
“I didn’t come here to sit and moan, you know,” said Isabel. “I didn’t want to sit here and make you feel miserable too. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to say sorry,” said Cat, taking Isabel’s hand.
“You just sit here as long as you like and then we can go out for lunch a bit later on. I could take the afternoon off and do something with you. How about that?”
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Isabel appreciated the offer, but she wanted to sleep that afternoon. And she should not sit at the table too long either, as it was meant for the use of customers.
“Perhaps you could come and have dinner with me tonight,”
she said. “I’ll rustle up something.”
Cat opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated. Isabel saw this. She would be going out with one of the boyfriends.
“I’d love to,” said Cat at last. “The only problem is that I was going to be meeting Toby. We were going to meet at the pub.”
“Of course,” said Isabel, quickly. “Some other time.”
“Unless Toby could come too?” Cat added. “I’m sure he’d be happy to do that. Why don’t I make a starter and bring it along?”
Isabel was about to refuse, as she imagined that the young couple might not really want to have dinner with her, but Cat now insisted, and they agreed that she and Toby would come to the house shortly after eight. As Isabel left and began to walk back to the house, she thought about Toby. He had arrived in Cat’s life a few months before, and like the one before him, Andrew, she had her misgivings about him. It was difficult to put one’s finger exactly on why it was that she had these reservations, but she was convinced that she was right.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
E
THAT AFTERNOON SHE SLEPT. When she awoke, shortly before five, she felt considerably better. Grace had gone, but had left a note on the kitchen table. Somebody phoned. He would not say who he was. I told him you were asleep. He said that he would phone again. I did not like the sound of him. She was used to notes like that from Grace: messages would be conveyed with a gloss on the character of those involved. That plumber I never trusted called and said that he would come tomorrow. He would not give a time. Or: While you were out, that woman returned that book she borrowed. At last.
She was usually bemused by Grace’s comments, but over the years she had come to see that Grace’s insights were useful.
Grace was rarely wrong about character, and her judgements were devastating. They were often of the one-word variety: cheat, she would say about somebody, or crook, or drunkard. If her views were positive, they might be slightly longer— most generous, or really kind—but these plaudits were hard to earn. Isabel had pressed her once as to the basis of her assessments of people, and Grace had become tight-lipped.
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“I can just tell,” she would say. “People are very easy to read.
That’s all there is to it.”
“But there’s often much more to them than you think,” Isabel had argued. “Their qualities only come out when you get to know them a bit better.”
Grace had shrugged. “There are some people I don’t want to get to know better.”
The discussion had ended there. Isabel knew that she would be unable to change the other woman’s mind. Grace’s world was very clear: there was Edinburgh, and the values which Edinburgh endorsed; and then there was the rest. It went without saying that Edinburgh was right, and that the best that could be hoped for was that those who looked at things differently would eventually come round to the right way of thinking. When Grace had first been employed—shortly after the onset of Isabel’s father’s illness—Isabel had been astonished to find that there was somebody who was still so firmly planted in a world that she had thought had largely disappeared: the world of douce Edinburgh, erected on rigid hierarchies and the deep convictions of Scottish Presbyterianism. Grace had proved her wrong.
It was the world which Isabel’s father had come from, but from which he had wanted to free himself. He had been a lawyer, from a line of lawyers. He could have remained within the narrow world of his own father and grandfather, a world bounded by trust deeds and documents of title, but as a student he had been introduced to international law and a world of broader possibilities.
He had enrolled for a master’s degree in the law of treaties; Harvard, where he went for this, might have offered him an escape, but in the event did not. Moral suasion was brought to bear on him to return to Scotland. He almost stayed in America, but 2 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h decided at the last moment to return, accompanied by his new wife, whom he had met and married in Boston. Once in Edinburgh, he was sucked back into the family’s legal practise, where he was never happy. In an unguarded moment he had remarked to his daughter that he regarded his entire working life as a sentence which he had been obliged to serve out, a conclusion that had privately appalled Isabel. It was for this reason that when her time came to go to university, she had put to one side all thoughts of a career and chosen the subject which really interested her, philosophy.
There had been two children: Isabel, the elder of the two, and a brother. Isabel had gone to school in Edinburgh, but her brother had been sent off to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. Their parents had chosen for him a school noted for intellectual achievement, and unhappiness. What could one expect?
The placing of five hundred boys together, cut off from the world, was an invitation to create a community in which every cruelty and vice could flourish, and did. He had become unhappy and rigid in his views, out of self-defence—the character armour which Wil-helm Reich spoke about, Isabel thought, and which led to these stiff, unhappy men who talked so guardedly in their clipped voices.
After university, which he left without getting a degree, he took a job in a City of London merchant bank, and led a quiet and correct life doing whatever it was that merchant bankers did. He and Isabel had never been close, and as an adult he contacted Isabel only occasionally. He was almost a stranger to her, she thought; a friendly, if rather detached, stranger whose only real passion that she could detect was a consuming interest in the collecting of colourful old share certificates and bonds: South American railway stock, czarist long-term bonds—a whole colourful world of capital-ism. But she had once asked him what lay behind these ornately 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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printed certificates of ownership. Fourteen-hour workdays on plantations? Men working for a pittance until they were too weakened by silicosis, or too poisoned by toxins, to work anymore? (Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?)
S H E W E N T I N TO T H E L A R D E R and retrieved the ingredients for a risotto she would make for Cat and Toby. The recipe called for porcini mushrooms, and she had a supply of these, tied up in a muslin bag. Isabel took a handful of the dried fungus, savouring the unusual odour, sharp and salty, so difficult to classify. Yeast extract? She would soak them for half an hour and then use the darkened liquid they produced to cook the rice. She knew that Cat liked risotto and that this was one of her favourites, and Toby, she imagined, would eat anything. He had been brought to dinner once before, and it was at this meal that her doubts about him had set in. She would have to be careful, though, or she would end up making Grace-like judgements. Unfaithful. She had already done it.
She returned to the kitchen and switched on the radio. It was the end of a news programme, and the world, as usual, was in disarray. Wars and rumours of war. A politician, a minister in the government, was being pressed for a response and refusing to answer. There was no crisis, he said. Things had to be kept in perspective.
But there is a crisis, insisted the interviewer; there just is.
That is a matter of opinion; I don’t believe in alarming people unduly.
It was in the middle of the politician’s embarrassment that 3 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the doorbell sounded. Isabel put the mushrooms into a bowl and went through to the hall to open the door. Grace had suggested that she install a spy hole in order to identify callers before she opened the door, but she had never done so. If anybody rang very late, she could peer at them through the letter box, but for the most part she would open the door on trust. If we all lived behind barriers, then we would be dreadfully isolated.
The man on the doorstep had his back to her and was looking out over the front garden. When the door opened he turned round, almost guiltily, and smiled at her.
“You’re Isabel Dalhousie?”
She nodded. “I am.” Her glance ran over him. He was in his mid-thirties, with dark, slightly bushy hair, smartly enough dressed in a dark blazer and charcoal slacks. He had small, round glasses and a dark red tie. There was a pen and an electronic diary of some sort in the top pocket of his shirt. She imagined Grace’s voice: Shifty.
“I’m a journalist,” he said, showing her a card with the name of his newspaper. “My name is Geoffrey McManus.”
Isabel nodded politely. She would never read his paper.
“I wondered if I could have a word with you,” he said. “I gather you witnessed that unfortunate accident in the Usher Hall last night. Could you talk to me about it?”
Isabel hesitated for a moment, but then she stepped back into the hall and invited him in. McManus moved forward quickly, as if he was concerned that she might suddenly change her mind. “Such an unpleasant business,” he said, as he followed her into the living room at the front of the house. “It was a terrible thing to happen.”
Isabel gestured for him to sit down and she placed herself on the sofa near the fireplace. She noticed that as he sat down he T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
3 1
cast an eye around the walls, as if assessing the value of the paintings. Isabel squirmed. She did not like to vaunt her wealth, and felt uncomfortable when it came under scrutiny. Perhaps he did not know, though. The painting by the door, for example, was a Peploe, and an early one. And the small oil beside the fireplace was a Stanley Spencer—a sketch for a part of When We Dead Awaken.
“Nice paintings,” he said jauntily. “You like art?”
She looked at him. His tone was familiar. “I do like art. Yes. I like art.”
He looked around the room again. “I interviewed Robin Philipson once,” he said. “I went to his studio.”
“You must have found that very interesting.”
“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t like the smell of paint, I’m afraid.
It gives me a headache.”
McManus was fiddling with a mechanical pencil, releasing the lead and then pushing it back in again. “May I ask you what you do? That is, if you work.”
“I edit a journal,” said Isabel. “A philosophical journal. The Review of Applied Ethics. ”
McManus raised an eyebrow. “We’re both in the same trade, then,” he said.
Isabel smiled. She was about to say “hardly” but did not. And in a sense he was right. Her job was a part-time one, involving the assessment and editing of scholarly papers, but ultimately it was, as he suggested, about getting words onto paper.
She returned to the subject of the incident. “What happened in the Usher Hall,” she said. “Is there anything more known about it?”
McManus took a notebook out of the pocket of his jacket and flipped it open. “Nothing much,” he said. “We know who the young man was and what he did. I’ve spoken to his flatmates and 3 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h I’m trying to get in touch with the parents. I’ll probably be able to see them this evening. They’re up in Perth.”
Isabel stared at him. He was proposing to speak to them this evening, in the middle of their grief. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you have to speak to those poor people?”
McManus fingered the spiral binder of his notebook. “I’m writing a story about it,” he said. “I need to cover every angle.
Even the parents.”
“But they’ll be terribly upset,” said Isabel. “What do you expect them to say? That they’re sorry about it?”
McManus looked at her sharply. “The public has a legitimate interest in these things,” he said. “I can see you don’t approve, but the public has a right to be informed. Do you have any problem with that?”
Isabel wanted to say that she did, but she decided not to engage with her visitor. Anything she said about intrusive journalism would make no difference to the way in which he saw his job. If he had moral qualms about speaking to the recently bereaved, she was sure that these would be kept very much in the background.
“What do you want to know from me, Mr. McManus?” she asked, glancing at her watch. He would be offered no coffee, she had decided.
“Right,” he said. “I would like to know what you saw, please.
Just tell me everything.”
“I saw very little,” said Isabel. “I saw him fall, and then, later on, I saw him being carried out on the stretcher. That’s all I saw.”
McManus nodded. “Yes, yes. But tell me about it. What did he look like going down? Did you see his face?”
Isabel looked down at her hands, which were folded on her lap. She had seen his face, and she had thought that he must T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
3 3
have seen her. His eyes had been wide, with what was either surprise or terror. She had seen his eyes.
“Why would you want to know if I saw his face?” she asked.
“That might tell us something. You know. Something about what he was feeling. About what happened.”
She stared at him for a moment, struggling with her distaste for his insensitivity. “I didn’t see his face. I’m sorry.”
“But you saw his head? Was he turned away from you, or facing you?”
Isabel sighed. “Mr. McManus, it all happened very quickly, in a second or so. I don’t think I saw very much. Just a body falling from above, and then it was all over.”
“But you must have noticed something about him,” McManus insisted. “You must have seen something. Bodies are made up of faces and arms and legs and all the rest. We see individual bits as well as the whole.”
Isabel wondered whether she could ask him to leave, and decided that she would do so in a moment. But his line of questioning suddenly changed.
“What happened afterwards?” he asked. “What did you do?”
“I went downstairs,” she said. “There was a group of people in the foyer. Everybody was pretty shocked.”
“And then you saw him being carried out?”
“I did.”
“And that’s when you saw his face?”
“I suppose so. I saw him going out on the stretcher.”
“Then what did you do? Did you do anything else?”
“I went home,” said Isabel sharply. “I gave my statement to the police and then I went home.”
McManus fiddled with his pencil. “And that was all you did?”
“Yes,” said Isabel.
3 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h McManus wrote something down in his notebook. “What did he look like on the stretcher?”
Isabel felt her heart thumping within her. There was no need for her to put up with any more of this. He was a guest—of sorts—in her house and if she no longer wished to discuss the matter with him, then she had only to ask him to leave. She took a deep breath. “Mr. McManus,” she began, “I really do not think that there’s much point in going into these matters. I cannot see what bearing it has on any report which you will publish of the incident. A young man fell to his death. Surely that is enough. Do your readers need to know anything more about how he looked on the way down? What do they expect? That he was laughing as he fell? That he looked cheerful on the stretcher? And his parents—what do they expect of them? That they are devastated?
Really, how remarkable!”
McManus laughed. “Don’t tell me my job, Isabel.”
“Ms. Dalhousie, actually.”
“Oh yes, Ms. Dalhousie. Spinster of this parish.” He paused.
“Surprising, that. You being an attractive woman, sexy if I may say so . . .”
She glared at him, and he looked down at his notebook.
“I have things to do,” she said, rising to her feet. “Would you mind?”
McManus closed his notebook, but remained seated.
“You’ve just given me a little lecture on how the press should behave,” he said. “I suppose you’re entitled to do that, if you wish.
But it’s a pity your own moral authority is a little bit shaky.”
She looked at him blankly, uncertain how to interpret his remark.
“You see, you lied,” McManus went on. “You said that you went home, whereas I happen to know, from my conversations 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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with the police, and with somebody else, that you went upstairs.
You were seen looking down from the exact spot where he fell.
But you very carefully failed to mention this to me. In fact, you said that you went home. Why would you lie to me, I wonder.”
Isabel answered quickly. “I had no reason to tell you that. It had nothing at all to do with the incident.”
“Really?” sneered McManus. “But what if I said that I thought you know more about this incident than you’re letting on? Don’t you think I’d be entitled to reach that conclusion now?”
Isabel moved towards the door and opened it pointedly. “I don’t have to put up with this in my own home,” she said. “If you wouldn’t mind leaving now.”
McManus rose to his feet, taking his time. “Sure,” he said.
“It’s your house. And I have no wish to outstay my welcome.”
She walked to the hallway and opened the front door.
McManus followed, stooping for a moment to inspect a painting on the way.
“You have some beautiful things,” he said. “Money?”
C H A P T E R F O U R
E
COOKING IN A TEMPER required caution with the pepper; one might put far too much in and ruin a risotto in sheer pique.
She felt dirtied by contact with McManus, as she inevitably did on those occasions when she found herself talking to somebody whose outlook on life was completely amoral. There were a surprising number of such people, she thought, and they were becoming more common; people to whom the idea of a moral sense seemed to be quite alien. What had appalled her most about McManus was the fact that he intended to talk to the parents, whose grief counted less for him than the desire of the public to witness the suffering of others. She shuddered. There was nobody, it seemed, to whom one might appeal; nobody who seemed prepared to say: Leave those poor people in peace.
She stirred the risotto, taking a small spoonful to test it for seasoning. The liquid from the soaked porcini mushrooms had imparted its flavour to the rice, and it was perfect. Soon she could put the dish in the lower oven and leave it there until Cat and Toby sat down with her at the table. In the meantime, there was a salad to prepare and a bottle of wine to open.
She felt calmer by the time the doorbell rang and she admitT 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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ted her guests. The evening had turned cool, and Cat was wearing a full-length brown coat which Isabel had bought her for a birthday several years ago. She took this off and laid it down on a hall chair, revealing a long red dress underneath. Toby, who was a tall young man a year or two older than Cat, was wearing a dark brown tweed jacket and a roll-top shirt underneath. Isabel glanced at his trousers, which were crushed-strawberry corduroy; exactly what she would expect him to wear. He had never surprised her in that respect. I must try, she thought. I have to try to like him.
Cat had brought a plate of smoked salmon, which she took through to the kitchen with Isabel while Toby waited for them in the downstairs drawing room.
“Are you feeling any better?” Cat asked. “You seemed so miserable this morning.”
Isabel took the plate of fish from her niece and removed the protective covering of foil.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m feeling much better.” She did not mention the journalist’s visit, partly because she wanted not to be thought to be dwelling on the subject and partly because she wanted to put it out of her mind.
They laid out the salmon and returned to the drawing room.
Toby was standing at the window, his hands clasped behind his back. Isabel offered her guests a drink, which she poured from the cabinet. When she handed his drink to Toby he raised it to her and gave the Gaelic toast.
“Slaint,” said Toby.
Isabel raised her glass weakly. Slaint, she was sure, would be Toby’s only word of Gaelic, and she did not like the peppering of one language with words from others; pas du tout. So she muttered, under her breath, “Brindisi.”
“Brin what?” asked Toby.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“Brindisi,” said Isabel. “The Italian toast.”
Cat glanced at her. She hoped that Isabel would not be mischievous: she was perfectly capable of winding Toby up.
“Isabel speaks quite good Italian,” Cat said.
“Useful,” said Toby. “I’m no good at languages. A few words of French, I suppose, left over from school, and a bit of German.
But nothing else.”
Toby reached for a piece of brown bread and smoked salmon.
“I can’t resist this stuff,” he said. “Cat gets it from somebody over in Argyll. Archie somebody, isn’t it, Cat?”
“Archie MacKinnon,” said Cat. “He smokes it himself in his garden, in one of those old smoking sheds. He soaks it in rum and then puts it over oak chips. It’s the rum that gives it that wonderful flavour.”
Toby reached for another of the largest pieces.
Cat quickly picked up the plate and offered it to Isabel. “I go up and see Archie when I go to Campbelltown,” she said, placing the plate at Isabel’s side. “Archie is a wonderful old man. Eighty-something, but still going out in his boat. He has two dogs, Max and Morris.”
“After the boys?” said Isabel.
“Yes,” said Cat.
Toby looked at the salmon. “What boys?”
“Max and Morris,” said Isabel. “Two German boys. The very first comic-book characters. They got up to all sorts of mischief and were eventually chopped into pieces by a baker and made into biscuits.”
She looked at Toby. Max and Morris had fallen into the baker’s flour vat and had been put into a mixing machine. The biscuits into which they had been made were eventually eaten by 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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ducks. Such a Germanic idea, she thought; and for a moment she imagined that this might happen to Toby, tumbling into such a machine and being made into biscuits.
“You’re smiling,” said Cat.
“Not intentionally,” said Isabel hurriedly. Did one ever mean to smile?
They talked for half an hour or so before the meal. Toby had been skiing with a group of friends and he talked about his off-piste adventures. There had been an awkward moment when they had caused a halfhearted avalanche, but they had managed to get out of trouble.
“A rather close thing,” he said. “You know what an avalanche sounds like?”
“Surf ?” suggested Isabel.
Toby shook his head. “Thunder,” he said. “Just like thunder.
And it gets louder and louder.”
Isabel imagined the scene—Toby in a strawberry-coloured ski suit with a tidal wave of snow hurtling down towards him, and the sun on the white peaks of the mountains. And then, just for a moment, she saw the snow overtake him and cover his flailing limbs in a churning of white, and then stillness, and there would be nothing but the tip of a ski pole to mark the spot. No, that was an unworthy thought, every bit as bad as imagining him being made into biscuits, and she put it out of her mind. But why had Cat not gone? She enjoyed skiing, but perhaps Toby had not invited her.
“You didn’t want to go, Cat?” she asked. It was a potentially awkward question, but there was something in the self-assuredness of this young man that made her feel mischievous.
Cat sighed. “The shop,” she said. “I can’t get away. I’d have loved to have gone. But I just couldn’t.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“What about Eddie?” said Toby. “Surely he’s old enough to look after things for a week or so. Can’t you trust him?”
“Of course I can trust him,” Cat retorted. “It’s just that Eddie is a bit . . . vulnerable.”
Toby looked sideways at her. He was sitting beside Cat on the sofa near the window and Isabel thought that she detected an incipient sneer. This was interesting.
“Vulnerable?” Toby said. “Is that what you call it?”
Cat looked down at her glass. Isabel watched Toby. There was a touch of cruelty in the face, she thought; just below the surface, below that well-scrubbed, slightly pink look. And the face was very slightly fleshy, she thought, and in ten years’ time his nose would begin to droop and . . . She stopped herself. She did not warm to him, but charity, the demands of which one should never forget, nudged at her gently.
“He’s a nice boy,” Cat mumbled. “He’s had a hard time. And I can rely on him absolutely. He’s very nice.”
“Of course he is,” said Toby. “Bit of a wimp, though, isn’t he?
Just a bit . . . you know.”
Isabel had been watching in discreet fascination, but now she felt that she would have to intervene. She did not want Cat embarrassed in this way, even if the prospect of scales tumbling from Cat’s eyes was an attractive one. What did she see in him?
Was there anything at all, apart from the fact that he was a perfect specimen of a certain sort of thoughtless masculinity? The language of Cat’s generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?
Look at John Liamor. He could talk for hours and every bit of it was interesting. People would sit, more or less at his feet, and 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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listen to him. What did it matter that he was thin and had that pale, almost translucent skin that went with a certain form of Celtic colouring? He was beautiful, in her eyes, and interesting, and now another woman, somebody whom she would never meet, somebody far away in California or wherever it was, had him for herself.
Isabel had met him in Cambridge. She was at Newnham, in the last year of her philosophy degree. He was a research fellow, a few years older than her, a dark-haired Irishman, a graduate of University College Dublin, who had been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Clare College and was writing a book on Synge. He had rooms at the back of the college, looking out over the Fellows’
Garden on the other side of the river, and he invited Isabel to these rooms, where he sat and smoked, and looked at her. She was disconcerted by his gaze, and she wondered whether, in her absence, he talked as condescendingly—and wittily—of her as he did of others.
John Liamor felt that most people in Cambridge were provincial—he came from Cork, originally, which presumably was anything but provincial. He despised the products of expensive English schools—“little Lord Fauntleroys”—and he sneered at the clerics who still peopled the college. “Reverend,” the title still borne by many dons in subjects as diverse as mathematics and classics, he changed to “Reversed,” which Isabel and others, without knowing quite why they should do so, found funny. The principal of his college, a mild man, an economic historian, who had never been anything but generous and accommodating to his Irish guest, he described as the “chief obscurantist.”
John Liamor gathered about him a salon of acolytes. These were students who were as much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas. It 4 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was the seventies, and the frothiness of the previous decade had subsided. What remained to believe in, or indeed to mock? Ambition and personal gain, those heady gods of the following decade, were in the wings, but not centre stage, which made a brooding Irishman with an iconoclastic talent an intriguing option. With John Liamor it was not essential to believe in anything; all that was required was the ability to mock. And that was where his real appeal lay; he could sneer at the sneerers themselves because he was Irish and they, for all their radicalism, were still English and therefore, in his view, irretrievably part of the whole apparatus of oppression.
Isabel did not fit easily into this circle, and people remarked on the unlikely nature of the developing liaison. John Liamor’s detractors, in particular—and he was not popular in his college, nor in the philosophy department—found the relationship a strange one. These people resented Liamor’s intellectual condescension, and its trappings; he read French philosophy and peppered his remarks with references to Foucault. And, for one or two of them at least, those who really disliked him, there was something else: Liamor wasn’t English. “Our Irish friend and his Scottish friend,” one of the detractors remarked. “What an interesting, interesting couple. She’s thoughtful; she’s reasonable; she’s civil; he’s a jumped-up Brendan Behan. One expects him to break into song at any moment. You know the sort. I could have cried with pride at the way he died, and so on. Lots of anger about what we were meant to have done to them back years ago. That sort of thing.”
At times she herself found it surprising that she was so attracted to him. It was almost as if there was nowhere else to go; that they were two people thrown together on a journey, who found themselves sharing the same railway compartment and 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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becoming resigned to each other’s company. Others found a more prosaic explanation. “Sex,” observed one of Isabel’s friends. “It brings all sorts of people together, doesn’t it? Simple. They don’t have to like each other.”
“ T H E P Y R E N E E S,” said Isabel suddenly.
Both Toby and Cat stared at her.
“Yes,” Isabel continued airily. “The Pyrenees. Do you know that I have never been to the Pyrenees? Not once.”
“I have,” said Toby.
“I haven’t,” said Cat. “But I would like to go.”
“We could go together,” Isabel pressed on, adding, “and Toby, too, of course, if you wanted to come, Toby. We could all go climbing. Toby would lead the way and we would all be roped to him. We’d be so safe.”
Cat laughed. “He’d slip, and then we’d all fall to our deaths . . .” She stopped herself suddenly. The remark had come out without her thinking of it, and now she glanced at Isabel apologetically. The whole point of the evening was to take her aunt’s mind off what had happened in the Usher Hall.
“The Andes,” Isabel said brightly. “Now, I have been to the Andes. And they’re just magnificent. But I could hardly breathe, you know, they are so high.”
“I went to the Andes once,” Toby chipped in. “At university.
Our climbing club went. One of the guys slipped and fell. Five hundred feet, if not more.”
There was a silence. Toby looked into his glass, remembering. Cat studied the ceiling.
*
*
*
4 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h A F T E R H E R G U E S T S had gone, leaving earlier than anticipated, Isabel stood in the middle of the kitchen and stared at the plates stacked above the dishwasher. The evening had not been a conspicuous success. The conversation had picked up slightly over the dinner table, but Toby had gone on at great length about wine—his father was a successful wine importer and Toby worked in the family firm. Isabel saw the way he sniffed at the wine she had poured him, thinking that she might not notice—but she did.
There was nothing wrong with it, surely; an Australian cabernet sauvignon, not a cheap one; but then wine people were suspicious of New World wines. Whatever they said to the contrary, there was an ineradicable snobbery in the wine world, with the French in the lead, and she imagined that Toby thought she knew no better than to serve a supermarket red. In fact, she knew more than most about wine, and there was nothing wrong with what she had served.
“Australian,” he had said simply. “South Australian.”
“Rather nice,” said Cat.
Toby ignored her. “Quite a bit of fruit.”
Isabel looked at him politely. “Of course, you’ll be used to better.”
“Good heavens,” said Toby. “You make me sound like a snob.
This is perfectly . . . perfectly all right stuff. Nothing wrong with it.”
He put down his glass. “We had a superb first-growth claret in the office the other day. You wouldn’t believe it. The old man fished it out from somewhere. Covered in dust. It faded pretty quickly, but if you took it before it faded, my God!”
Isabel had listened politely. She felt slightly cheered by his performance as she thought that Cat would be bound to tire of this sort of talk, and of Toby with it. Boredom would set in sooner rather than later, and when that happened it would eclipse what-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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ever else it was that she liked about him. Could Cat really be in love with him? Isabel thought it was unlikely, as she detected a sensitivity to his faults—the eyes cast ever so slightly upwards, for example—whenever he made a remark which embarrassed her. We are not embarrassed by those we love; we may experience passing discomfort, but it is never embarrassment in the true sense. We forgive them their shortcomings, or we may just never notice them. And she had forgiven John Liamor, of course, even when she had found him one night with a student in his rooms at the college, a girl who giggled and wrapped herself in his dis-carded shirt, while John merely looked out the window and said,
“Bad timing, Liamor.”
It might be simpler, she reflected, not to allow oneself to be in love with anybody; just to be oneself, immune to hurt from others.
There were plenty of people like that who seemed content with their lives—or were they? She wondered how many of these people were solitary by choice, and how many were alone because nobody had ever come into their lives and relieved them of their loneliness. There was a difference between resignation, or acceptance, in the face of loneliness and choosing to be solitary.
The central mystery, of course, was why we needed to be in love at all. The reductionist answer was that it was simply a matter of biology, and that love provided the motivational force that encouraged people to stay together to raise children. Like all the arguments of evolutionary psychology, it looked so simple and so obvious, but if that was all that we were, then why did we fall in love with ideas, and things, and places? Auden had captured this potential in pointing out that as a boy he had fallen in love with a pumping engine, and thought it “every bit as beautiful as you.”
Displacement, the sociobiologists would say; and there was the old Freudian joke that tennis is a substitute for sex. To which 4 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h there was only one reply: that sex could equally well become a substitute for tennis.
“Very funny,” Cat had said when Isabel had once pointed this out to her. “But surely it’s absolutely right. Our emotions all seem geared towards keeping us in one piece, as animals, so to speak.
Fear and flight. Fighting over food. Hatred and envy. All very physical and connected with survival.”
“But might one not equally say that the emotions have a role in developing our higher capacities?” Isabel had countered. “Our emotions allow us to empathise with others. If I love another, then I know what it is to be that other person. If I feel pity—
which is an important emotion, isn’t it?—then this helps me to understand the suffering of others. So our emotions make us grow morally. We develop a moral imagination.”
“Perhaps,” Cat had said, but she had been looking away then, at a jar of pickled onions—this conversation had taken place in the delicatessen—and her attention had clearly wandered. Pickled onions had nothing to do with moral imagination, but were important in their own quiet, vinegary way, Isabel supposed.
A F T E R CAT A N D TO B Y had left, Isabel went outside, into the cool of the night. The large walled garden at the back of the house, hidden from the road, was in darkness. The sky was clear, and there were stars, normally not visible in the city, obscured by all the light thrown up by human habitation. She walked over the lawn towards the small wooden conservatory, under which she discovered a fox had recently made its burrow. She had named him Brother Fox, and had seen him from time to time—a svelte creature running sure-footed along the top of the wall or dashing across the road at night, on impenetrable business of its own. She 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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had welcomed him, and had left a cooked chicken out one night, as an offering. By morning it had disappeared, although she later found a bone in a flower bed, well gnawed, the marrow extracted.
What did she want for Cat? The answer was simple: she wanted happiness, which sounded trite, but was nevertheless true. In Cat’s case, that meant that she should find the right man, because men seemed to be so important to her. She did not resent Cat’s boyfriends—in principle, at least. Had she done so, the cause of her resentment would have been obvious: jealousy.
But it was not that. She acknowledged what was important for her niece, and only hoped that she would find out what she was looking for, what she really wanted. In Isabel’s view that was Jamie. And what about myself ? she thought. What do I want?
I want John Liamor to walk through the door and say to me: I’m sorry. All these years that we’ve wasted. I’m sorry.
C H A P T E R F I V E
E
NOTHING MORE ABOUT the incident appeared in what Isabel called the “lower papers” (well, they are, she would defend herself: look at their content); and what she referred to as the
“morally serious papers,” The Scotsman and The Herald, were also silent on the subject. For all Isabel knew, McManus might have found out no more, or if he had pieced together a few more scraps of detail, his editor could have deemed it to be too inconsequential to print. There was a limit to what one could make of a simple tragedy, even if it had occurred in unusual circumstances. She assumed that there would be a Fatal Accident Inquiry, which was always held when a death occurred in sudden or unexpected circumstances, and this might be reported when it took place. These were public hearings, before the local judge, the sheriff, and in most cases the proceedings were quick and conclusive. Factory accidents in which somebody was found to have forgotten that a wire was live; a misconnected carbon monoxide extractor; a shot-gun that was thought to be unloaded. It did not take too long to unravel the tragedy, and the sheriff would make his determination, as it was called, patiently listing what had gone wrong and what needed to be put right, warning sometimes, but for the most 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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part not passing much comment. And then the court would move on to the next death, and the relatives of the last would make their way out onto the street in sad little knots of regret. The most likely conclusion in this case would be that an accident had occurred.
Because it had taken place so publicly, there might be comments on safety, and the sheriff could suggest a higher rail in the gods.
But it could be months before any of this happened, and by then, she hoped, she might have forgotten it.
She might have discussed it again with Grace, but her housekeeper, it appeared, had other things on her mind. A friend was experiencing a crisis and Grace was lending moral support. It was a matter of masculine bad behaviour, she explained; her friend’s husband was going though a midlife crisis and his wife, Grace’s friend, was at her wit’s end.
“He’s bought an entire new wardrobe,” Grace explained, casting her eyes upwards.
“Perhaps he feels like a change of clothing,” ventured Isabel.
“I’ve done that myself once or twice.”
Grace shook her head. “He’s bought teenage clothes,” she said. “Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. That sort of thing. And he’s walking around listening to rock music. He goes to clubs.”
“Oh,” said Isabel. Clubs sounded ominous. “What age is he?”
“Forty-five. A very dangerous age for men, we’re told.”
Isabel thought for a moment. What might one do in such a case?
Grace supplied her answer. “I laughed at him,” she said. “I came straight out and said he looked ridiculous. I told him that he had no business wearing teenage boys’ clothing.”
Isabel could picture it. “And?”
“He told me to mind my own business,” Grace said indig-5 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h nantly. “He said that, just because I was past it, he was not. So I said, past what? And he didn’t reply.”
“Trying,” said Isabel.
“Poor Maggie,” Grace went on. “He goes off to these clubs and never takes her, not that she would want to go anyway. She sits at home and worries about what he’s getting up to. But there’s not much I can do. I did give him a book, though.”
“And what was that?”
“It was a dog-eared old book. I found it in a bookshop in the West Port. One Hundred Things for a Teenage Boy to Do. He didn’t think it funny.”
Isabel burst out laughing. Grace was direct, which came, she imagined, from being brought up in a small flat off the Cowgate, a home in which there was no time for much except work, and where people spoke their minds. Isabel was conscious of how far Grace’s experience had been from her own; she had enjoyed all the privileges; she had had every chance educationally, while Grace had been obliged to make do with what was available at an indifferent and crowded school. It sometimes seemed to Isabel as if her education had brought her doubt and uncertainty, while Grace had been confirmed in the values of traditional Edinburgh.
There was no room for doubt there; which had made Isabel wonder, Who is happier, those who are aware, and doubt, or those who are sure of what they believe in, and have never doubted or questioned it? The answer, she had concluded, was that this had nothing to do with happiness, which came upon you like the weather, determined by your personality.
“My friend Maggie,” Grace announced, “thinks that you can’t be happy without a man. And this is what makes her so concerned about Bill and his teenage clothes. If he goes off with a younger woman, then there’ll be nothing left for her, nothing.”
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“You should tell her,” said Isabel. “You should tell her that you don’t need a man.”
She made this remark without thinking how Grace might interpret it, and it suddenly occurred to her that Grace might think that this was Isabel suggesting that Grace was a confirmed spinster, who had no chance of finding a man.
“What I meant to say,” Isabel began, “was that one doesn’t need—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Grace interjected. “I know what you meant.”
Isabel glanced at her quickly and then continued, “I’m not one to talk about men, anyway. I wasn’t conspicuously successful myself.”
But why? she wondered. Why had she been unsuccessful?
Wrong man, or wrong time, or both?
Grace looked at her quizzically. “What happened to him, that man of yours? John what’s-his-name? That Irishman? You’ve never really told me.”
“He was unfaithful,” said Isabel, simply. “All the time when we lived in Cambridge. And then, when we went to Cornell and I was on my fellowship there, he suddenly announced that he was going off to California with another woman, a girl really, and that was it. He just left in the space of one day.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes, just like that. America went to his head. He said that it freed him up. I’ve heard that normally cautious people can go quite mad there, just from feeling free of whatever it was that was holding them back at home. He was like that. He drank more, he had more girlfriends, and he was more impetuous.”
Grace digested this. Then she asked, “He’s still there, I suppose?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel shrugged. “I assume so. But I imagine that he’s with somebody else by now. I don’t know.”
“But would you like to find out?”
The answer was that of course she would. Because against all reason, against all personal conviction, she would forgive him if he came back and asked her for forgiveness, which he would never do, of course. And that made her safe from this weakness; the fact that never again would she be bewitched by John Liamor, never again would she be in that particular and profound danger.
S H E WA S O N H E R WAY to forgetting the Usher Hall incident two weeks later when she was invited to a party at a gallery to mark the opening of a show. Isabel bought paintings, and this meant that a steady stream of gallery invitations came into the house. For the most part she avoided the openings, which were cramped and noisy affairs, riddled with pretension, but when she knew that there would be strong interest in the paintings on display she might go to the opening—and arrive early, in order to see the work before rival red dots appeared underneath the labels.
She had learned to do this after arriving late for the opening of a Cowie retrospective and finding that the few paintings that had been for sale had been bought within the first fifteen minutes.
She liked Cowie, who had painted haunting pictures of people who seemed to be cocooned in old-fashioned stillness; quiet rooms in which sad-faced schoolgirls were occupied in drawing or in embroidery; Scottish country roads and paths that seemed to lead into nothing but further silence; folds of cloth in the artist’s studio. She had two small Cowie oils and would have been happy to purchase another, but she had been too late and she had learned her lesson.
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The show which opened that evening was of work by Elizabeth Blackadder. She had toyed with the idea of buying a large watercolour, but had decided to look at the other paintings before deciding. She did not find anything else that appealed, and when she returned, a red dot had appeared below the watercolour. A young man, somewhere in his late twenties and wearing a chalk-striped suit, was standing in front of it, glass in hand. She glanced at the painting, which seemed even more desirable now that it had been sold, and then she looked at him, trying not to show her annoyance.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” he said. “I always think of her as a Chinese painter. That delicacy. Those flowers.”
“And cats too,” Isabel said, rather grumpily. “She paints cats.”
“Yes,” said the young man. “Cats in gardens. Very comfortable. Not exactly social realism.”
“Cats exist,” said Isabel. “For cats, her paintings must be social realism.” She looked at the painting again. “You’ve just bought it?” she asked.
The young man nodded. “For my fiancée. As an engagement present.”
It was said with pride—pride in the fact of the engagement rather than in the purchase—and Isabel immediately softened.
“She’ll love it,” she said. “I was thinking of buying it myself, but I’m glad you’ve got it.”
The young man’s expression turned to concern. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “They said that it was available. There was no indication . . .”
Isabel brushed his comment aside. “Of course there wasn’t.
It’s first come, first served. You beat me to it. Exhibitions are meant to be red in tooth and claw.”
“There are others,” he said, gesturing to the wall behind 5 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h them. “I’m sure that you’ll find something as good as this. Better, perhaps.”
Isabel smiled. “Of course I will. And anyway, my walls are so full I would have had to take something down. I don’t need another painting.”
He laughed at her comment. Then, noticing her empty glass, he offered to refill it for her, and she accepted. Returning, he introduced himself. He was Paul Hogg, and he lived one block away in Great King Street. He had seen her at one of the gallery shows, he was sure, but Edinburgh was a village, was it not, and one always saw people one had seen somewhere or other before.
Did she not think that too?
Isabel did. Of course, that had its drawbacks, did it not?
What if one wanted to lead a secret life? Would it not be difficult in Edinburgh? Would one have to go over to Glasgow to lead it there?
Paul thought not. He knew several people, it transpired, who led secret lives, and they seemed to do it successfully.
“But how do you know about their secret lives?” asked Isabel.
“Did they tell you themselves?”
Paul thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “If they told me, then they would hardly be secret.”
“So you found out?” said Isabel. “Rather proves my point.”
He had to admit that it did, and they laughed. “Mind you,” he said, “I can’t imagine what I would do in a secret life, if I had one to lead. What is there to do that people really disapprove of these days? Nobody seems to blink an eyelid over affairs. And convicted murderers write books.”
“Indeed they do,” said Isabel. “But are these books really any good? Do they really say anything to us? Only the very immature and the very stupid are impressed by the depraved.” She was 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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silent for a moment. Then: “I suppose there must be something that people are ashamed of and are prepared to do in secret.”
“Boys,” said Paul. “I know somebody who goes for boys. Nothing actually illegal. Seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds. But really just boys still.”
Isabel looked at the painting, at the flowers and the cats. It was a long way from the world of Elizabeth Blackadder.
“Boys,” she said. “I suppose some people find boys . . . how shall I put it? Interesting. One might want to be secretive about that. Not that Catullus was. He wrote poems about that sort of thing. He seemed not in the slightest bit embarrassed. Boys are a recognised genre in classical literature, aren’t they?”
“This person I know goes off to Calton Hill, I think,” said Paul. “He drives up there in an empty car and drives down again with a boy. In secret, of course.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Oh well. People do these things.”
There were things happening on one side of Edinburgh the other did not know a great deal about. Of course, Edinburgh, it was said, was built on hypocrisy. It was the city of Hume, of course, the home of the Scottish Enlightenment, but then what had happened? Petty Calvinism had flourished in the nineteenth century and the light had gone elsewhere; back to Paris, to Berlin, or off to America, to Harvard and the like, where everything was now possible. And Edinburgh had become synonymous with respectability, and with doing things in the way in which they had always been done. Respectability was such an effort, though, and there were bars and clubs where people might go and behave as they really wanted to behave, but did not dare do so publicly. The story of Jekyll and Hyde was conceived in Edinburgh, of course, and made perfect sense there.
“Mind you,” Paul went on, “I have no secret life myself. I’m 5 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h terribly conventional. I’m actually a fund manager. Not very exciting. And my fiancée works in Charlotte Square. So we’re not really . . . how might one put it?”
“Bohemian?” said Isabel, laughing.
“That’s right,” he said. “We’re more . . .”
“Elizabeth Blackadder? Flowers and cats?”
They continued their conversation. After fifteen minutes or so, Paul put his glass down on a windowsill.
“Why don’t we go to the Vincent Bar?” he said. “I have to meet Minty at nine, and I can’t be bothered to go back to the flat.
We could have a drink and carry on talking. That’s if you’d like to.
You may have other things to do.”
Isabel was happy to accept. The gallery had filled up and was beginning to get hot. The level of conversation had risen, too, and people were shouting to be heard. If she stayed she would have a sore throat. She collected her coat, said good-bye to the gallery owners, and walked out with Paul to the small, unspoilt bar at the end of the road.
The Vincent Bar was virtually empty and they chose a table near the front door, for the fresh air.
“I hardly ever go to a pub,” said Paul. “And yet I enjoy places like this.”
“I can’t remember when I was last in one,” said Isabel.
“Maybe in an earlier life.” But of course she could remember those evenings, with John Liamor, and that was painful.
“I was a fund manager in an earlier life, I suspect,” said Paul.
“And presumably that’s what I’ll be in the next.”
Isabel laughed. “Surely your job must have its moments,” she said. “Watching markets. Waiting for things to happen. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Oh, I suppose it has its moments,” he said. “You have to read 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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a lot. I sit at my desk and go through the financial press and company reports. I’m a sort of spy, really. I collect intelligence.”
“And is it a good place to work?” asked Isabel. “Are your colleagues agreeable people?”
Paul did not answer immediately. Lifting his glass, he took a long sip of his beer. When he answered, he looked down at the table as he spoke. “By and large, yes. By and large.”
“Which means no,” said Isabel.
“No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that . . . well, I lost somebody who worked for me. A few weeks ago. I have—had—two people under me in my department, and he was one of them.”
“He went elsewhere?” asked Isabel. “Lured away? I gather that everybody’s frantically busy headhunting everybody else.
Isn’t that the way it works?”
Paul shook his head. “He died,” he said. “Or rather, he was killed. In a fall.”
It could have been a climbing accident; those happened in the Highlands virtually every week. But it was not, and Isabel knew it.
“I think I know who it was,” she said. “Was it at—”
“The Usher Hall,” said Paul. “Yes. That was him. Mark Fraser.” He paused. “Did you know him?”
“No,” said Isabel. “But I saw it happen. I was there, in the grand circle, talking to a friend, and he came falling down, right past us, like a . . . like a . . .”
She stopped, and reached out to touch Paul’s arm. He was clutching his glass, staring down at the table, appalled by what she was saying.
C H A P T E R S I X
E
IT ALWAYS HAPPENED when one was in a room with smokers.
She remembered reading somewhere that the reason for it was that the surfaces of nonsmokers’ clothes were covered with negative ions, while tobacco smoke was full of positive ions. So when there was smoke in the air, it was immediately attracted to the oppositely charged surface, which made one’s clothes smell. And that was why, when she lifted up the jacket that she had been wearing the previous evening and which she had left lying across the top of her bedroom chair, she was assailed by the stale, acrid smell of tobacco smoke. There had been smokers in the Vincent Bar, as there always were in bars, and even though she and Paul had sat near the door, it had been enough to leave its mark.
Isabel gave the jacket a good shake before the open window, which always helped, before putting it away in the wardrobe. Then she returned to the window and looked out over the garden, to the trees beside her wall, the tall sycamore and the twin birches which moved so readily in the wind. Paul Hogg. It was a Borders name, and whenever she encountered it she thought of James Hogg, the writer known as the Ettrick Shepherd, the most distinguished of the Hoggs, although there were other, even English, Hoggs.
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Quintin Hogg, a lord chancellor (and perhaps slightly porcine in appearance, though, as she reminded herself, one should not be uncharitable to Hoggs), and his son, Douglas Hogg. And so on. All these Hoggs.
They had not stayed long in the bar. The recollection of Mark Fraser’s fall had visibly upset Paul, and although he had rapidly changed the subject, a shadow had fallen over their evening. But before they finished their drinks and went their separate ways, he had said something which had made her sit up sharply. “He would never have fallen. He had a head for heights, you see. He was a climber. I went with him up Buchaille Etive Mhor. He went straight up. An absolute head for heights.”
She had stopped him and asked him what he meant. If he would not have fallen, then had he deliberately jumped? Paul had shaken his head. “I doubt it. People surprise you, but I just cannot see why he would have done that. I spent hours with him earlier that day, hours, and he was not in the least bit down. Quite the opposite, in fact; one of the companies which he had drawn to our attention, and in which we had invested heavily, had come up with a spectacular set of interim results. The chairman had sent him a memo congratulating him on his perspicacity and he was very pleased with this. Smiling. Cat with the cream. Why would he do himself in?”
Paul had shaken his head, and then had changed the subject, leaving her to wonder. And now she was wondering again, as she went downstairs for breakfast. Grace had arrived early and had put on her egg to boil. There were comments on a story in the newspapers; a government minister had been evasive in parlia-mentary question time and had refused to give the information which the opposition had requested. Grace had put him down as a liar the first time she saw his photograph in the paper, and now 6 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h here was the proof. She looked at her employer, challenging her to deny the proposition, but Isabel just nodded.
“Shocking,” she said. “I can’t remember when exactly it was that it became all right to lie in public life. Can you remember?”
Grace could. “President Nixon started it. He lied and lied.
And then it came across the Atlantic and our people started to lie too. That’s how it started. Now it’s standard practise.”
Isabel had to agree. People had lost their moral compass, it seemed, and this was just a further example. Grace, of course, would never lie. She was completely honest, in small things and big, and Isabel trusted her implicitly. But then Grace was not a politician, and never could be one. The first lies, Isabel assumed, had to be told at the candidate selection board.
Of course, not all lies were wrong, which was another respect, Isabel thought, in which Kant was mistaken. One of the most ridiculous things that he had ever said was that there was a duty to tell the truth to the murderer looking for his victim. If the murderer came to one’s door and asked, Is he in? one would be obliged to answer truthfully, even if this would lead to the death of an innocent person. Such nonsense; and she could remember the precise offending passage: Truthfulness in statements which cannot be avoided is the formal duty of an individual to everyone, however great may be the disadvantage accruing to himself or to another. It was not surprising that Benjamin Constant should have been offended by this, although Kant responded—unconvincingly—
and tried to point out that the murderer might be apprehended before he acted on the knowledge which he had gained from a truthful answer.
The answer, surely, is that lying in general is wrong, but that some lies, carefully identified as the exception, will be permissible. There were, therefore, good lies and bad lies, with good lies 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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being uttered for a benevolent reason (to protect the feeling of another, for example). If somebody asked one’s opinion of a newly acquired—but tasteless—possession, for instance, and one gave an honest answer, then that could hurt feelings and deprive the other of the joy of ownership. So one lied, and praised it, which was surely the right thing to do. Or was it? Perhaps it was not as simple as that. If one became accustomed to lying in such circumstances, the line between truth and falsehood could become blurred.
Isabel thought that she might visit this issue in detail one day and write a paper on the subject. “In Praise of Hypocrisy” might be a suitable title, and the article might begin: “To call a person a hypocrite is usually to allege a moral failing. But is hypocrisy inevitably bad? Some hypocrites deserve greater consideration . . .”
There were further possibilities. Hypocrisy was not only about telling lies, it was about saying one thing and doing quite the other. People who did that were usually roundly condemned, but again this might not be as simple as some would suggest. Would it be hypocritical for an alcoholic to advise against drinking alcohol, or a glutton to recommend a diet? The recipient of the advice might well level charges of hypocrisy in such a case, but only if the person giving the advice claimed that he did not drink or eat too much himself. If he merely concealed his own vices, then he might still be considered a hypocrite, but his hypocrisy might be no bad thing. It certainly did not harm anybody, and indeed it might even help (provided that it remained undiscovered). This was a topic which would have been ideal for the Sunday Philosophy Club. Perhaps she would try to get people together for precisely such a discussion. Who could resist an invitation to discuss hypocrisy? The members of the club, she suspected.
Her boiled egg placed on the table, she sat down with a copy 6 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of The Scotsman and a freshly brewed cup of coffee, while Grace went off to start the laundry. There was nothing of note in the paper—she could not bring herself to read an account of the doings of the Scottish Parliament—and so she quickly passed to the crossword. Four across: He conquers all, a nubile tram (11) .
Tamburlaine, of course. It was an old clue and it even appeared as the final line of one of Auden’s poems. WHA, as she thought of him, liked to do the crossword, and would have The Times deliv-ered to Kirchstetten for that very purpose. There he lived, in his legendary domestic mess, with manuscripts and books and over-flowing ashtrays, doing the Times crossword each day, with a tat-tered volume of the big Oxford open on a chair beside him. She would have so loved to have met him, and talked, even just to thank him for everything that he had written (except the last two books), but she rather feared that he might have written her off as one of his legion of bluestocking admirers. Six down: A homespun poet, a pig in charge of sheep? (4). Hogg, naturally. (But a coincidence, nonetheless.)
She finished the crossword in the morning room, allowing her second cup of coffee to get too cool to drink. She felt uneasy for some reason, almost queasy, and she wondered whether she had not perhaps had rather too much to drink the previous evening. But, going over it, she had not. She had had two small-ish glasses of wine at the opening, and a further one, if somewhat larger, in the Vincent Bar. That was hardly enough to unsettle her stomach or trigger a headache. No, her feeling of unease was not physical; she was upset. She had imagined that she had recovered from witnessing that awful event, but clearly she had not, and it was still having its psychological effect. Putting down the newspaper, she looked up at the ceiling and wondered whether this was what they called post-traumatic stress disorder. Soldiers 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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suffered from it in the First World War, although they called it shell shock then, and shot them for cowardice.
She thought of the morning ahead. There was work to be done; at least three journal articles were waiting to be sent out to referees, and she would have to despatch them that morning.
Then there was an index to be prepared for a special issue that was due to appear later that year. She did not enjoy indexing and she had been putting the task off. But it would have to be sent to the general editor for approval before the end of the week, which meant that she would have to sit down to it either that day or the following day. She looked at her watch. It was almost nine-thirty.
If she worked for three hours she would get through most, if not all, of the index. That would take her to twelve-thirty, or perhaps almost one o’clock. And then she could go and have lunch with Cat, if she was free. The thought cheered her up: a good spell of work followed by a relaxed chat with her niece was exactly what she needed to get over this temporary blue feeling—the perfect cure for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Cat was available, but only at one-thirty, as Eddie had asked to take his lunch break early. They would meet at the bistro opposite the delicatessen; Cat preferred getting out for lunch rather than taking up one of her own few tables. Besides, she knew that Eddie listened to her conversation when he could, and this irritated her.
Isabel made good progress with her index, finishing the task shortly after twelve. She printed out what she had done and put it in an envelope for posting on the way in to Bruntsfield. Finishing the work had lifted her spirits considerably, but it had not taken her mind off her conversation with Paul. That still worried her, and she kept thinking of the two of them, Paul and Mark, climbing together up Buchaille Etive Mhor, roped together per-6 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h haps, with Mark turning and looking down at Paul, and the sun on his face. His photograph, published in the newspapers, had shown him to be so good-looking, which seemed to make everything all the sadder, although, of course, it should not. When the beautiful died, it was the same as when the less well blessed died; that was obvious. But why did it seem more tragic that Rupert Brooke, or Byron for that matter, should die, than other young men? Perhaps it was because we love the beautiful more; or because Death’s momentary victory is all the greater. Nobody, he says, smiling, is too beautiful not to be taken by me.
The crowd in the bistro had thinned out by one-thirty, when she arrived. There were two tables occupied at the back, one by a group of women with shopping bags stacked at their feet, and another by three students, who were sitting in a huddle over a story that one of them was recounting. Isabel sat down at an empty table and studied the menu while she waited for Cat. The women ate in near silence, tackling long strands of tagliatelle with their forks and spoons, while the students continued their conversation. Isabel could not help but overhear snatches of it, particularly when one of the students, a young man in a red jer-sey, raised his voice.
“. . . and she said to me that if I didn’t go with her to Greece, then I couldn’t keep the room in the flat, and you know how cheaply I get that. What could I do? You tell me. What would you have done in my position?”
There was a momentary silence. Then one of the others, a girl, said something which Isabel did not catch, and there was laughter.
Isabel glanced up, and then returned to her scrutiny of the menu. The young man lived in a flat which was owned by this 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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anonymous she. She wanted him to go to Greece, and was obviously prepared to use whatever bargaining power she had to see to it that he did. But if she was coercing him in this way, then he would hardly be much of a travelling companion.
“I told her that . . .” Something was said which Isabel missed, and then: “I said that I would come only if she left me alone. I decided to come right out with it. I said that I knew what she had in mind . . .”
“You flatter yourself,” said the girl.
“No, he doesn’t,” said the other young man. “You don’t know her. She’s a man-eater. Ask Tom. He could tell you.”
Isabel wanted to ask, “And did you go? Did you go to Greece?”
but could not, of course. This young man was as bad as the girl who had asked him. They were all unpleasant; all sitting there gossiping in this snide way. You should never discuss the sexual offers of others, she thought. Don’t kiss and tell summed it up nicely. But these students had no sense of that.
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 Isabel: 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.
They had argued about Isabel’s inability to say no, which in Cat’s view was the root of the problem. “You simply can’t get drawn into other people’s business like this,” she had protested after Isabel had become involved in sorting out the problems of a hotel-owning family that was fighting over what to do with their business. But Isabel, who had regularly been taken for Sunday lunch in the hotel as a child, had considered that this gave her an interest in what happened to it and had become sucked into an unpleasant boardroom battle.
Cat had voiced the same concerns when it came to the unfor-7 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tunate young man in the Usher Hall. “But this is my business,”
said Isabel. “I saw the whole thing—or most of it. I was the last person that young man saw. The last person. And don’t you think that the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”
“I’m not with you,” said Cat. “I don’t see what you mean.”
Isabel leant back in her chair. “What I mean is this. We can’t have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbours, people we deal with, and so on.”
Who, then, is our neighbour? she would say to the Sunday Philosophy Club. And the members of the Sunday Philosophy Club would think very carefully about this and come to the conclusion, Isabel suspected, that the only real standard we can find for this is the concept of proximity. Our moral neighbours are those who are close to us, spatially or in some other recognised sense. Distant claims are simply not as powerful as those we can see before us. These close claims are more vivid and therefore more real.
“Reasonable enough,” said Cat. “But you didn’t come into contact with him in that sense. He just . . . sorry to say this . . .
he just passed by.”
“He must have seen me,” said Isabel. “And I saw him—in a state of extreme vulnerability. I’m sorry to sound the philosopher, but in my view that creates a moral bond between us. We were not moral strangers.”
“You sound like the Review of Applied Ethics, ” said Cat dryly.
“I am the Review of Applied Ethics, ” Isabel replied.
The remark made them both laugh, and the tension that had been growing dissipated.
“Well,” said Cat, “there’s obviously nothing that I can do to 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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stop you doing whatever it is you want to do. I may as well help you. What do you need?”
“The address of his flatmates,” said Isabel. “That’s all.”
“You want to speak to them?”
“Yes.”
Cat shrugged. “I can’t imagine that you’ll find out much.
They weren’t there. How will they know what happened?”
“I want some background,” said Isabel. “Information about him.”
“All right,” said Cat. “I’ll find this out for you. It won’t be hard.”
As she walked home after her lunch with Cat, Isabel thought about their discussion. Cat had been right to ask her about why she involved herself in these matters; it was a question she should have asked herself more often, but did not. Of course, it was simple to work out why we had a moral obligation to others, but that was really not the point. The question which she had to address was what drove her to respond as she did. And one reason for that, if she were honest with herself, might be that she simply found it intellectually exciting to become involved. She wanted to know why things happened. She wanted to know why people did the things they did. She was curious. And what, she wondered, was wrong with that?
Curiosity killed the cat, she suddenly thought, and immediately regretted the thought. Cat was everything to her, really; the child she had never had, her parlous immortality.
C H A P T E R S E V E N
E
ISABEL HAD EXPECTED to spend the evening alone. Her progress with the index had encouraged her to tackle another task which she had been putting off—detailed work on an article which had returned from a reviewer accompanied by a lengthy set of comments and corrections. These had been scribbled in the margins and needed to be collated, a task which was rendered all the more difficult by the reviewer’s irritating abbrevia-tions and spidery handwriting. That was the last time he would be used, she had decided—eminent or not.
But Jamie arrived instead, ringing her bell shortly before six.
She welcomed him warmly, and immediately invited him to stay for dinner, if he had nothing else planned, of course. She knew that he would accept, and he did, after a momentary hesitation for form’s sake. And for the sake of pride: Jamie was Cat’s age, twenty-four, and it was a Friday evening. Everybody else would have something planned for that evening, and he would not want Isabel to think that he had no social life.
“Well,” he said, “I was thinking of meeting up with somebody, but since you ask . . . Why not?”
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Isabel smiled. “It will be potluck, as usual, but I know you’re not fussy.”
Jamie took off his jacket and left it with his bag in the hall.
“I’ve brought some music with me,” he said. “I thought you might like to accompany me. Later on, that is.”
Isabel nodded. She played the piano moderately well and could usually just manage to keep up with Jamie, who was a tenor.
He had a trained voice and sang with a well-known chorus, which was another attribute, she thought, which Cat could have taken into consideration. She had no idea whether Toby could sing, but would be surprised if he could. He would also be unlikely to play a musical instrument (except the bagpipes, perhaps, or, at a stretch, percussion), whereas Jamie played the bassoon. Cat had a good ear for music and was a reasonable pianist as well. In that brief period when she and Jamie had been together, she had accompanied him brilliantly, and she had brought him out of himself as a performer. They sounded so natural together, Isabel had thought. If only Cat would realise! If only she would see what she was giving up. But of course Isabel understood that there was no objectivity when it came to these matters. There were two tests: the best interests test and the personal chemistry test. Jamie was in Cat’s best interests—Isabel was convinced of that—but personal chemistry was another matter.
Isabel shot a glance at her guest. Cat must have been sufficiently attracted to him in the first place, and she could see why, looking at him now. Cat liked tall men, and Jamie was as tall as Toby, perhaps even slightly taller. He was undoubtedly good-looking: high cheekbones, dark hair that he tended to have cut en brosse, and skin with a natural tan. He could have been Portuguese—almost—or Italian, perhaps, although he was Scottish 7 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h on both sides. What more could Cat want? she thought. Really!
What else could a girl possibly require than a Scotsman who looked Mediterranean and could sing?
The answer came to her unbidden, like an awkward truth that nudges one at the wrong moment. Jamie was too nice. He had given Cat his whole attention—had fawned on her, perhaps—and she had grown tired of that. We do not like those who are completely available, who make themselves over to us entirely. They crowd us out. They make us feel uneasy.
That was it. If Jamie had maintained some distance, a degree of remoteness, then that would have attracted Cat’s interest.
That was why she seemed so happy now. She could not possess Toby, who would always seem slightly remote, as if he were excluding her from some part of his plans (which he was, Isabel had convinced herself). It was wrong to think of men as the pred-ators: women had exactly the same inclinations, although often more discreetly revealed. Toby was suitable prey. Jamie, by making it quite apparent that Cat had his complete and unfettered attention, had ceased to interest her. It was a bleak conclusion.
“You were too good to her,” she muttered.
Jamie looked at her in puzzlement. “Too good?”
Isabel smiled. “I was thinking aloud,” she said. “I was thinking that you were too good to Cat. That’s why it didn’t work out.
You should have been more . . . more evasive. You should have let her down now and then. Looked at other girls.”
Jamie said nothing. They had often discussed Cat—and he still nurtured the hope that Isabel would be his way back into Cat’s affections, or so Isabel thought. But this new view she was expressing was an unexpected one, no doubt. Why should he have let her down?
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Isabel sighed. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t want to go over all that again.”
Jamie raised his hands. “I don’t mind. I like talking about her.
I want to talk about her.”
“Oh, I know,” said Isabel. She paused. She wanted to say something to him that she had not said before, and was judging her moment. “You love her still, don’t you? You’re still in love.”
Jamie looked down at the carpet, embarrassed.
“Just like myself,” said Isabel quietly. “The two of us. I’m still a bit in love with somebody whom I knew a long time ago, years ago. And there you are, also in love with somebody who doesn’t seem to love you. What a pair we are, the two of us. Why do we bother?”
Jamie was silent for a moment. Then he asked her, “What’s he called? Your . . . this man of yours.”
“John Liamor,” she said.
“And what happened to him?”
“He left me,” Isabel said. “And now he lives in California.
With another woman.”
“That must be very hard for you,” said Jamie.
“Yes, it is very hard,” said Isabel. “But then it’s my own fault, isn’t it? I should have found somebody else instead of thinking about him all the time. And that’s what you should do, I suppose.”
The advice was halfhearted; but as she gave it she realised it was exactly the right advice to give. If Jamie found somebody else, then Cat might show an interest in him once Toby was disposed of. Disposed of! That sounded so sinister, as if the two of them might arrange an accident. An avalanche, perhaps.
“Could one start an avalanche?” she asked.
Jamie’s eyes opened wide. “What an odd thing to ask,” he 7 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h said. “But of course you could. If the snow is in the right condition, then all you have to do is to shift a bit of it, tread on it, even, and the whole thing gets going. Sometimes you can start them just by talking in a loud voice. The vibrations of your voice can make the snow start to move.”
Isabel smiled. She again imagined Toby on a mountainside, in his crushed-strawberry ski suit, talking loudly about wine. “Do you know I had the most wonderful bottle of Chablis the other day. Fabulous. Flinty, sharp . . .” There would be a pause, and the words “flinty, sharp” would echo across the snowfields, just enough to start the tidal wave of snow.
She checked herself. That was the third time that she had imagined him in a disaster and she should stop. It was childish, uncharitable, and wrong. We have a duty to control our thoughts, she said to herself. We are responsible for our mental states, as she well knew from her reading in moral philosophy. The unbidden thought may arrive, and that was a matter of moral indifference, but we should not dwell on the harmful fantasy, because it was bad for our character, and besides, one might just translate fantasy into reality. It was a question of duty to self, in Kantian terms, and whatever she thought about Toby, he did not deserve an avalanche or to be reduced to biscuits. Nobody could be said to deserve that, not even the truly wicked, or a member of that other Nemesis-tempting class, the totally egotistical.
And who were they, she wondered, these practitioners of hubris? She had a small mental list of those who might be warned, for their own protection, of how close they were to attracting the attentions of Nemesis—a list which was headed by a local social climber of breathtaking nerve. An avalanche might reduce his self-satisfaction, but that was unkind; he had his good 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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side, and such thoughts had to be put aside. They were unworthy of the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics.
“Music before dinner,” said Isabel briskly. “What have you brought with you? Let me take a look.”
THEY MOVED THROUGH to the music room, a small room at the back of the house, furnished with a restored Edwardian music stand and her mother’s baby grand piano. Jamie opened his music case and extracted a thin album of music, which he handed to Isabel for examination. She flicked through the pages and smiled.
It was exactly the sort of music that he always chose, settings of Burns, arias from Gilbert and Sullivan, and, of course, “O mio babbino caro.”
“Just right for your voice,” Isabel said. “As usual.”
Jamie blushed. “I’m not much good at the newer stuff,” he said. “Remember that Britten? I couldn’t do it.”
Isabel was quick to reassure him. “I like these,” she said.
“They’re much easier to play than Britten.”
She paged through the book again and made her choice.
“ ‘ Take a pair of sparkling eyes’?”
“Just so,” said Jamie.
She began the introduction and Jamie, standing in his singing pose, head tilted slightly forward so as not to restrict the larynx, gave voice to the song. Isabel played with determination—which was the only way to play Gilbert and Sullivan, she thought—and they finished with a flourish that was not exactly in the music but that could have been there if Sullivan had bothered. Then it was Burns, and “John Anderson, My Jo.”
John Anderson, she thought. Yes. A reflection on the passage 7 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of the years, and of love that survives. But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo. There was an ineffable sadness in this line that always made her catch her breath. This was Burns in his gentler mood, addressing a constancy that by all accounts, including his own, eluded him in his own relations with women. What a hypocrite! Or was he? Was there anything wrong with celebrating qualities one lacked oneself? Surely not. People who suffered from akrasia (which philosophers knew all about and enjoyed debating at great length) could still profess that it was better to do that which they themselves could not do. You can say that it is bad to overindulge in chocolate, or wine, or any of the other things in which people like to overindulge, and still overindulge yourself. The important thing, surely, is not to conceal your own overindulgence.
“John Anderson” was meant to be sung by a woman, but men could sing it if they wished. And in a way it was even more touching when sung by a man, as it could be about a male friendship too.
Not that men liked to talk—still less to sing—about such things, which was something which had always puzzled Isabel. Women were so much more natural in their friendships, and in their acceptance of what their friendships meant to them. Men were so different: they kept their friends at arm’s length and never admitted their feelings for them. How arid it must be to be a man; how con-strained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in the desert. And yet how many exceptions there were; how marvellous, for example, it must be to be Jamie, with that remarkable face of his, so full of feeling, like the face of one of those young men in Florentine Renaissance paintings.
“John Anderson,” said Isabel, as she played the last chord, and the music faded away. “I was thinking of you and John Anderson. Your friend John Anderson.”
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“I never had one,” said Jamie. “I never had a friend like that.”
Isabel looked up from the music, and out the window. It was beginning to get dark, and the branches of the trees were silhou-etted against a pale evening sky.
“Nobody? Not even as a boy? I thought boys had passionate friendships. David and Jonathan.”
Jamie shrugged. “I had friends. But none I stuck to for years and years. Nobody I could sing that about.”
“How sad,” said Isabel. “And do you not regret it?”
Jamie thought for a moment. “I suppose I do,” he said. “I’d like to have lots of friends.”
“You could get lots of friends,” said Isabel. “You people—at your age—you can make friends so easily.”
“But I don’t,” said Jamie. “I just want . . .”
“Of course,” said Isabel. She lowered the keyboard cover and rose to her feet.
“We shall go through for dinner now,” she said. “That’s what we shall do. But first . . .”
She turned back to the piano and began to play once more, and Jamie smiled. “Soave sia il vento,” may the breeze be gentle, the breeze that takes your vessel on its course; may the waves be calm. An aria more divine than anything else ever written, thought Isabel, and expressing such a kind sentiment too, what one might wish for anybody, and oneself too, although one knew that sometimes it was not like that, that sometimes it was quite different.
AT THE END of their dinner, which they ate in the kitchen, seated at the large pine refectory table which Isabel used for informal dinners—the kitchen being warmer than the rest of the 8 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h house—Jamie remarked: “There’s something you said back there in the music room. You told me about this man, John what’s-he-called . . .”
“Liamor. John Liamor.”
Jamie tried out the name. “Liamor. Not an easy name, is it, because the tongue has to go up for the li and then depress itself for the ah, and then the lips have to do some work. Dalhousie’s much easier. But anyway, what you said has made me think.”
Isabel reached for her coffee cup. “I’m happy to be thought provocative.”
“Yes,” Jamie went on. “How exactly does one get involved with somebody who doesn’t make you happy? He didn’t make you happy, did he?”
Isabel looked down at her place mat—a view of the Firth of Forth from the wrong side, from Fife. “No, he did not. He made me very unhappy.”
“But did you not see that near the beginning?” asked Jamie. “I don’t want to pry, but I’m curious. Didn’t you see what it was going to be like?”
Isabel looked up at him. She had had that brief discussion with Grace, but it was not something that she really talked about.
And what was there to say, anyway, but to acknowledge that one loved the wrong person and carried on loving the wrong person in the hope that something would change?
“I was rather smitten by him,” she said quietly. “I loved him so much. He was the only person I really wanted to see, to be with. And the rest didn’t seem to matter so much because of the pain that I knew I’d feel if I gave him up. So I persisted, as people do. They persist.”
“And . . .”
“And one day—we were in Cambridge—he asked me to go 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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with him to Ireland, where he came from. He was going to spend a few weeks with his parents, who lived in Cork. And I agreed to go, and that, I suppose, was when I made the real mistake.”
She paused. She had not imagined that she would talk to Jamie about this, as it would be admitting him to something that she would rather have kept from him. But he sat there, and looked at her expectantly, and she decided to continue.
“You don’t know Ireland, do you? Well, let me tell you that they have a very clear idea of who they are and who everybody else is, and what the difference is. John had been a great mocker at Cambridge—he laughed at all the middle-class people he saw about him. He called them petty and small-minded. And then, when we arrived at his parents’ place in Cork, it was a middle-class bungalow with a Sacred Heart on the kitchen wall. And his mother did her best to freeze me out. That was awful. We had a flaming row after I came right out and asked her whether she disliked me most because I wasn’t a Catholic or because I wasn’t Irish. I asked her which it was.”
Jamie smiled. “And which was it?”
Isabel hesitated. “She said . . . she said, this horrible woman, she said that it was because I was a slut.”
She looked up at Jamie, who stared back at her wide-eyed.
Then he smiled. “What a . . .” He trailed off.
“Yes, she was, and so I insisted to John that we leave, and we went off to Kerry and ended up in a hotel down there, where he asked me to marry him. He said that if we were married, then we could get a college house when we went back to Cambridge. So I said yes. And then he said that we would get a genuine Irish priest to do that, a ‘reversed’ as he called them. And I pointed out that he didn’t believe, and so why ask for a priest? And then he replied that the priest wouldn’t believe either.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She paused. Jamie had picked up his table napkin and was folding it. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I’m sorry about all that. I shouldn’t have asked you, should I?”
“I don’t mind,” said Isabel. “But it does show how these big decisions are just drifted into in a rather messy way. And that we can be very wrong about everything. Don’t be wrong in your life, Jamie. Don’t get it all wrong.”
C H A P T E R E I G H T
E
THE MESSAGE WAS TAKEN by Grace the following morning, when Isabel was out in the garden. The address she was looking for was 48, Warrender Park Terrace, fourth floor right. The name on the door would be Duffus, which was the name of the girl who had shared with Mark Fraser. She was called Henrietta Duffus, but was known as Hen, and the man, the third of the original three flatmates, was Neil Macfarlane. That was all that Cat had managed to come up with, but it was all that she had asked Cat to find out.
Grace passed on the information to Isabel with a quizzical look, but Isabel decided not to tell her what it was about. Grace had firm views on inquisitiveness and was inevitably discreet in her dealings. She would undoubtedly have considered any enquiries which Isabel was planning to make to be quite unwarranted, and would have made a comment along those lines. So Isabel was silent.
She had decided to visit the flatmates that evening, as there would be no point in calling during the day, when they would be at work. For the rest of that day she worked on the review, reading several submissions which had arrived in that morning’s post.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h This was an important screening process. Like any journal, no matter how academic, the review received contributions that were completely unsuitable and which need not even be sent off to a specialist reader. That morning, though, had brought five serious articles, and these would have to be looked at carefully.
She settled down at first to a carefully argued piece on rule utilitarianism in the legislative process, leaving the spicier “Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships: A Challenge to Kant” for later in the morning. That was one for after coffee, she thought; she liked to savour criticism of Kant.
The day passed quickly. The rule utilitarianism article was weighty, but largely unreadable, owing to the author’s style. It appeared to be written in English, but it was a variety of English which Isabel felt occurred only in certain corners of academia, where faux weightiness was a virtue. It was, she thought, as if the English had been translated from German; not that the verbs all migrated to the end, it was just that everything sounded so heavy, so utterly earnest.
It was tempting to exclude the unintelligible paper on the grounds of grammatical obfuscation, and then to write to the author—in simple terms—and explain to him why this was being done. But she had seen his name and his institution on the title page of the article, and she knew that there would be repercus-sions if she did this. Harvard!
“Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships” was more clearly written, but said nothing surprising. We should tell the truth, the author argued, but not the whole truth. There were occasions when hypocrisy was necessary in order to protect the feelings of others. (It was as if the author were echoing her own recently articulated thought on the subject.) So we should not tell our lovers that they are inadequate lovers—if that is what they are.
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Quite clearly only if that is what they are, thought Isabel. The limits to honesty in that department were particularly severe, and rightly so.
She read the article with some amusement, and thought that it would make a lively read for the review’s subscribers, who perhaps needed a bit of encouragement. The philosophy of sex was an unusual area of applied ethics, but it had its exponents, who met, she knew, at an annual conference in the United States. The review had occasionally published advance notice of these meetings, but she had wondered whether these bland few sentences gave the full story: morning session: Sexual Semiotics and Private Space; coffee; Perversion and Autonomy; lunch (for there were other appetites to consider), and so on into the afternoon. The abstracts of the papers were probably accurate enough, but what, might one wonder, went on afterwards at such a conference?
These people were not prudes, she suspected, and they were, after all, applied ethicists.
Isabel herself was no prude, but she believed very strongly in discretion in sexual matters. In particular, she was doubtful about when it was right, if ever, to publish details of one’s own sexual affairs. Would the other person have consented? she wondered; probably not, and in that case one did another a wrong by writing about what was essentially a private matter between two people.
There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers. You should be able to tell your doctor anything, safe in the knowledge that what you said would not go beyond the walls within which it was said, and the same should be true of your lover. And yet this notion was under attack: the state wanted information from doctors (about your genes, about your sexual habits, about your childhood illnesses), and doctors had to resist. And the vulgar curious, of 8 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h whom there were countless legions, wanted information about your sexual life, and would pay generously to hear it—if you were sufficiently well known. Yet people were entitled to their secrets, to their sense that at least there was some part of their life which they could regard as ultimately, intimately private; because if they were denied this privacy, then the very self was diminished.
Let people have their secrets, Isabel thought, although probably unfashionably.
Unfortunately philosophers were notable offenders when it came to self-disclosure. Bertrand Russell had done this, with his revealing diaries, and A. J. Ayer too. Why did these philosophers imagine that the public should be interested in whether or not they slept with somebody, and how often? Were they trying to prove something? Would she have resisted Bertrand Russell? she wondered; and answered her own question immediately. Yes. And A. J. Ayer too.
By six o’clock the backlog of articles had been cleared and covering letters had been written to referees in respect of those which were going to be taken to the next stage. She had decided that six-thirty would be the ideal time to call at number 48, Warrender Park Terrace, as this would give the flatmates time to return from work (whatever that was) and yet would not interfere with their dinner arrangements. Leaving her library, she went through to the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee before setting off.
It was not a long walk to Warrender Park Terrace, which lay just beyond the triangle of park at the end of Bruntsfield Avenue.
She took her time, looking in shopwindows before finally strolling across the grass to the end of the terrace. Although it was a pleasant spring evening, a stiff breeze had arisen and the clouds were scudding energetically across the sky, towards Norway. This was 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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a northern light, the light of a city that belonged as much to the great, steely plains of the North Sea as it did to the soft hills of its hinterland. This was not Glasgow, with its soft, western light, and its proximity to Ireland and to the Gaeldom of the Highlands.
This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.
She reached Warrender Park Terrace and followed it round its slow curve. It was a handsome street, occupying one side of the road and looking out over the Meadows and the distant pinnacled roofs and spires of the old infirmary. The building, a high tenement in the Victorian manner, rose in six stories of dressed stone, topped with a high-raked slate roof. Some of these roofs were bor-dered with turrets, like the slated turrets of French châteaux, with ironwork devices at the point. Or the edge of the roofs had stone crenellations, carved thistles, the occasional gargoyle, all of which would have given the original occupants the sense that they were living in some style, and that all that distinguished their dwellings from those of the gentry was mere size. But in spite of these con-ceits, they were good flats, solidly built, and although originally intended for petit-bourgeois occupation they had become the pre-serve of students and young professionals. The flat she was visiting must have been typical of numerous such establishments rented by groups of three or four young people. The generous size of the flats made it possible for each tenant to have his or her own room without impinging upon the largish living room and dining room. It would be a comfortable arrangement, which would serve the residents until marriage or cohabitation beckoned. And of course such flats were the breeding ground of lasting friendships—and lasting enmities too, she supposed.
The flats were built around a common stone staircase, to 8 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h which access would be gained by an imposing front door. These doors were usually locked, but could be opened from the flats above by the pressing of a button. Isabel looked at the range of bells at the front door and found one labelled “Duffus.” She pushed it and waited. After a minute or so a voice sounded through the small speaker of the intercom and asked her what she wanted.
Isabel bent to speak into the tiny microphone on the intercom box. She gave her name and explained that she would like to speak to Miss Duffus. It was in connection with the accident, she added.
There was a brief pause, and then the buzzer sounded. Isabel pushed the door open and began to climb up the stairs, noting that stale, slightly dusty smell which seemed to hang in the air of so many common stairs. It was the smell of stone which has been wet and now has dried, coupled with the slight odour of cooking that would waft out of individual flats. It was a smell that reminded her of childhood, when she had gone every week up such a stairway to her piano lessons at the house of Miss Marilyn McGibbon—Miss McGibbon, who had referred to music which starred her; which meant she was stirred. Isabel still thought of starring music.
She paused, and stood still for a moment, remembering Miss McGibbon, whom she had liked as a child, but from whom she had picked up, even as a child, a sense of sadness, of something unresolved. Once she had arrived for her lesson and had found her red-eyed, with marks of tears on the powder which she applied to her face, and had stared at her mutely until Miss McGibbon had turned away, mumbling: “I am not myself. I apologise. I am not myself this afternoon.”
And Isabel had said: “Has something sad happened?”
Miss McGibbon had started to say yes, but had changed it to 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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no, and had shaken her head, and they had turned to the scales which Isabel had learned and to Mozart, and nothing more had been said. Later, as a young adult, she had learned quite by chance that Miss McGibbon had lost her friend and companion, one Lalla Gordon, the daughter of a judge of the Court of Session, who had been forced to choose between her family (who disapproved of Miss McGibbon) and her friendship, and who had chosen the former.
T H E F L AT WA S O N the fourth floor and by the time that Isabel had reached the landing, the door was already slightly ajar. A young woman was standing just within the hall, and she opened the door as Isabel approached. Isabel smiled at her, taking in at a glance Hen Duffus’s appearance: tall, almost willowy, and wide-eyed in that appealing, doelike way which Isabel always associated with girls from the west coast of Scotland, but which presumably had nothing to do with that at all. Her smile was returned as Hen asked her to come in. Yes, Isabel thought as she heard the accent: the west, although not Glasgow, as Cat had said, but somewhere small and couthy, Dunbarton perhaps, Helens-burgh at a stretch. But she was definitely not a Henrietta; Hen, yes; that was far more suitable.
“I’m sorry to come unannounced. I hoped I might just find you in. You and . . .”
“Neil. I don’t think he’s in. But he should be back soon.”
Hen closed the door behind them and pointed to a door down the hallway. “We can go through there,” she said. “It’s the usual mess, I’m afraid.”
“No need to apologise,” said Isabel. “We all live in a mess. It’s more comfortable that way.”
9 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“I’d like to be tidy,” said Hen. “I try, but I guess you can’t be what you aren’t.”
Isabel smiled, but said nothing. There was a physicality about this woman, an air of . . . well, sexual energy. It was unmistak-able, like musicality, or asceticism. She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
The living room, into which Hen led Isabel, looked out to the north, over the trees that lined the southern edge of the Meadows. The windows, which were generous Victorian, must have flooded the room with light in the day; even now, in the early evening, the room needed no lights. Isabel crossed the room to stand before one of the windows. She looked down. Below them on the cobbled street, a boy dragged a reluctant dog on a lead.
The boy bent down and struck the dog on the back, and the animal turned round in self-defence. Then the boy kicked it in the ribs and dragged on the lead again.
Hen joined her at the window and looked down too. “He’s a wee brat, that boy. I call him Soapy Soutar. He lives in the ground-floor flat with his mother and a bidie-in. I don’t think that dog likes any of them.”
Isabel laughed. She appreciated the reference to Soapy Soutar; every Scottish child used to know about Oor Wullie and his friends Soapy Soutar and Fat Boab, but did they now? Where do the images of Scottish childhood come from now? Not, she thought, from the streets of Dundee, those warm, mythical streets which the Sunday Post peopled with pawky innocents.
They turned away from the window and Hen looked at Isabel.
“Why have you come to see us? You aren’t a journalist, are you?”
Isabel shook her head vigorously. “Certainly not. No, I was a witness. I saw it happen.”
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Hen stared at her. “You were there? You saw Mark fall?”
“I’m afraid I did.”
Hen looked behind her for a seat and sat down. She looked down at the floor, and for a moment she said nothing. Then she raised her eyes. “I don’t really like to think of it, you know. It’s only a few weeks, and I’m already trying to forget about it. But it’s not easy, when you lose a flatmate like that.”
“Of course. I can understand.”
“We had the police round, you know. They came and asked about Mark. Then we had his parents, to come and take his things away. You can imagine what that was like.”
“Yes I can.”
“And there were other people,” Hen went on. “Mark’s friends. Somebody from his office. It went on and on.”
Isabel sat down on the sofa, next to Hen. “And now me. I’m sorry to intrude. I can imagine what all this is like.”
“Why did you come?” asked Hen. It was not said in an unfriendly way, but there was an edge to the question that Isabel picked up. It was exhaustion perhaps; exhaustion in the face of another interrogation.
“I had no real reason,” Isabel said quietly. “I suppose it’s because I was involved in it and I had nobody to talk to about it—
nobody connected with it, if you see what I mean. I saw this thing happen—this horrible thing—and I knew nobody who knew anything about him, about Mark.” She paused. Hen was watching her with her wide almond eyes. Isabel believed what she was saying, but was it the whole truth? And yet she could hardly tell these people that the reason why she was here was sheer curiosity about what happened; that, and a vague suspicion that there was something more to the incident.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Hen closed her eyes, then nodded. “I understand,” she said.
“That’s fine with me. In a way I’d like to hear about what actually happened. I’ve imagined it enough.”
“You don’t mind then?”
“No, I don’t mind. If it’s going to help you, then that’s all right with me.” She reached out and touched Isabel’s arm. The sympathetic gesture was unexpected, and Isabel felt—unworthily, she thought—that it was out of character. “I’ll make some coffee,”
Hen went on, rising to her feet. “Then we can talk.”
Hen left the room, and Isabel leant back into the sofa and looked about her. It was well furnished, unlike many rented flats, which quickly develop a well-used look. There were prints on the wall—the landlord’s taste, presumably mixed with that of the tenants: a view of the Falls of Clyde (landlord); A Bigger Splash, by Hockney, and Amateur Philosophers, by Vettriano (tenants); and Iona, by Peploe (landlord). She smiled at the Vettriano—he was deeply disapproved of by the artistic establishment in Edinburgh, but he remained resolutely popular. Why was this? Because his figurative paintings said something about people’s lives (at least about the lives of people who danced on the beach in formal clothing); they had a narrative in the same way in which Edward Hopper’s paintings did. That was why there were so many poems inspired by Hopper; it was because there was a now-read-on note to everything he painted. Why are the people there? What are they thinking of ? What are they going to do now? Hockney, of course, left nothing unanswered. It was very clear what everybody was about in a Hockney picture: swimming, and sex, and narcissism. Had Hockney drawn WHA? She remembered that he had; and he had captured rather well the geological catastro-phe that was WHA’s face. I am like a map of Iceland. Had he said that? She thought not, but he could have. She would write a book 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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one day about quotations which were entirely apocryphal but which could be attributed to people who might have said just that.
I’ve reigned all afternoon, and now it’s snowing. Queen Victoria.
She had been staring at the Vettriano and now looked away and through the door. There was a mirror in the hall—a long dress mirror of the sort more usually found on the back of wardrobe doors. From where she was sitting she had an unimpeded view of it, and at that precise moment she saw a young man dart out of a door, cross the hall, and disappear into another room. He did not see her, though it seemed as if he was aware of her presence in the flat. And it seemed, too, that he had not intended that she should see him, which she would not have done, save for the strategically placed mirror. And he was quite naked.
After a few minutes Hen returned, carrying two cups. She placed the cups on the table in front of the sofa and sat down next to Isabel again. “Did you ever meet Mark?”
Isabel was on the point of saying yes, for it seemed to her, bizarrely, as if she had, but shook her head instead. “That was the first time I saw him. That night.”
“He was a really good guy,” said Hen. “He was great. Everyone liked him.”
“I’m sure they did,” said Isabel.
“I was a bit unsure to begin with, you know, living with two people I hadn’t met before. But I took the room here at the same time as they got it. So we all started off together.”
“And it worked?”
“Yes, it worked. We had the occasional argument, as one would expect. But never anything serious. It worked very well.”
Hen picked up her cup and sipped at the coffee. “I miss him.”
“And Neil, your flatmate? They were friends?”
“Of course,” said Hen. “They sometimes played golf together, 9 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h although Neil was too good for Mark. Neil is almost a scratch player. He could have been a professional, you know. He’s a trainee lawyer with a firm in the West End. Stuffy place, but they all are, aren’t they? This is Edinburgh after all.”
Isabel picked up her coffee cup and took her first sip. It was instant, but she would try to drink it, out of politeness.
“What happened?” she said quietly. “What do you think happened?”
Hen shrugged. “He fell. That’s all that could have happened.
One of those freak accidents. He looked over for some reason and fell. What else?”
“Might he have been unhappy?” said Isabel. She made the suggestion cautiously, as it could have been met with an angry response, but it was not.
“You mean suicide?”
“Yes. That.”
Hen shook her head. “Definitely not. I would have known. I just would. He wasn’t unhappy.”
Isabel considered Hen’s words. “I would have known.” Why would she have known? Because she lived with him; that was the obvious reason. One picked up the moods of those with whom one lived in close proximity.
“So there were no signs of that?”
“No. None.” Hen paused. “He just wasn’t like that. Suicide is a cop-out. He faced up to things. He was . . . You could count on him.
He was reliable. He had a conscience. You know what I mean?”
Isabel watched her as she spoke; the word “conscience” was not one which one heard very much anymore, which was strange, and ultimately worrying. It had to do with the disappearance of guilt from people’s lives, which was no bad thing, in one sense, as guilt had caused such a mountain of unnecessary unhappiness.
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But there was still a role for guilt in moral action, as a necessary disincentive. Guilt underlined wrong; it made the moral life possible. That apart, there was another aspect to what Hen had said.
The words were uttered with conviction, but they could only have been spoken by one who had never been depressed, or gone through a period of self-doubt.
“Sometimes people who are very clear about things on the outside are not so sure inside . . . they can be very unhappy, but never show it. There are . . .” She trailed off. Hen clearly did not appreciate being spoken to in this way. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lecture you . . .”
Hen smiled. “That’s all right. You’re probably right—in general, but not in this case. I really don’t think it was suicide.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Isabel. “You obviously knew him very well.”
For a few moments there was a silence, as Hen sipped at her coffee, apparently deep in thought, and Isabel looked at the Vettriano, wondering what to say next. There seemed little point in continuing the conversation; she was not going to learn much more from Hen, who had probably said as much as she wanted to say and who was, in Isabel’s view, not very perceptive anyway.
Hen put her cup down on the table. Isabel moved her gaze from the oddly disturbing picture. The young man whom she had seen in the corridor was now entering the room, fully clothed.
“This is Neil,” said Hen.
Isabel rose to shake hands with the young man. The palm of his hand was warm, and slightly moist, and she thought: He’s been in the shower. That was why he had been dashing naked across the hall. Perhaps that was not unusual these days; that flatmates, casual friends, should wander about unclothed, in perfect innocence, as children in Eden.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Neil sat down on the chair opposite the sofa while Hen explained why Isabel was there.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” said Isabel. “I just wanted to talk about it. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” said Neil. “I don’t mind. If you want to talk about it, that’s fine with me.”
Isabel glanced at him. His voice was very different from Hen’s; from the other side of the country, she thought, but disclosing an expensive education somewhere. He was Hen’s age, she thought, or perhaps slightly older, and like her he had a slightly outdoors look to him. Of course, he was the golfer, and what she was seeing was the effect of time spent on blustery Scottish fairways.
“I don’t think I should burden you much more,” said Isabel.
“I’ve met you. I’ve talked about what happened. I should let you get on with things.”
“Has it helped?” asked Hen, exchanging a glance, Isabel noted, with Neil. The meaning of the glance was quite clear, Isabel thought: she would say to him afterwards, “Why did she have to come? What was the point of all that?” And she would say that because she was nothing to that young woman; she was a woman in her forties, out of it, not real, of no interest.
“I’ll take your cup,” said Hen suddenly, rising to her feet. “I have to get something going in the kitchen. Excuse me a minute.”
“I must go,” said Isabel, but she remained on the sofa when Hen had gone out of the room, and she looked at Neil, who was watching her, his hands resting loosely on the arms of the chair.
“Do you think that he jumped?” Isabel asked.
His face was impassive, but there was something disconcert-ing in his manner, an uneasiness. “Jumped?”
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“Committed suicide?”
Neil opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it again. He stared at Isabel.
“I’m sorry to ask you that,” she went on. “I can see that you think the answer is no. Well, you’re probably right.”
“Probably,” he said quietly.
“May I ask you another thing?” she said, and then, before her question could be answered, “Hen said that Mark was popular.
But might there have been anybody who disliked him?”
The question had been uttered, and now she watched him. She saw his eyes move, to look down at the floor, and then up again.
When he answered he did not look at her, but stared out the door, into the hall, as if to look for Hen to answer the question for him.
“I don’t think so. No. I don’t think so.”
Isabel nodded. “So there really was nothing . . . nothing unusual in his life?”
“No. Nothing unusual.”
He looked at her now, and she saw in his eyes a look of dislike. He felt—and who could blame him for this?—that it was none of her business to go prying into his friend’s life. She had clearly outstayed her welcome, as Hen had made apparent, and now she would have to leave. She rose to her feet, and he followed her example.
“I’d just like to say good-bye to Hen,” she said, moving into the hall, followed by Neil. She looked about her quickly. The door out of which he had darted when she had by chance looked into the mirror must be the door immediately to her right.
“She’s in the kitchen, isn’t she?” she said, turning and pushing open the door.
“That’s not it,” he called after her. “That’s Hen’s room.”
9 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h But Isabel had taken a step forward and saw the large bedroom, with its bedside lamp on and its closed curtain, and the unmade bed.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“The kitchen’s over here,” he said sharply. “That door there.”
He looked at her sideways. He was nervous, she thought; nervous and hostile.
She withdrew, and walked over to the door which he had indicated. She found Hen, who was embarrassed to be seen sitting on a stool reading a magazine. But she thanked her profusely, and said good-bye, and then left the flat, to the sound of Neil locking the door behind her. She had left them her card, and had said that they could contact her if they ever wanted to, but they had looked at it doubtfully, and she knew that they would not. She had felt awkward and foolish, which, she now thought, was how she deserved to feel. But at least something had become clear.
Hen and Neil were lovers, which was why he had been in her room when she had rung the bell downstairs. Hen had told her that Neil was not yet home, but then she could hardly have explained to her, a complete stranger, that he was in her bed, and at that hour. Of course this vindicated her instinct about Hen, but it had little bearing on her knowledge of how they had lived together, the three of them. It could be, of course, that Mark had felt excluded. Hen implied that she had not known the other two when she first moved into the flat, and this meant that at some point the relationship had become one of more intimate cohabitation. This might have changed the dynamics of their communal life, from a community of three friends to one of a couple and a friend. Alternatively, it was possible that Hen and Neil had fallen into each other’s arms after Mark’s death, for comfort and solace in their shared sorrow, perhaps. She could imagine that this 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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might have been the case, but again it made no difference to her understanding of what might have been going through Mark’s head on that evening at the Usher Hall. If she had known him hardly at all before she called on the flat in Warrender Park Terrace, she did not know him any better now. He had been a pleasant young man, popular and not given to self-doubt; no surprise, perhaps, as self-doubt is the territory of the teenager and, much later, of the failing, not of young men in their twenties. If he had been concerned about something, then his concern must have been hidden from those who were closest to him in his daily life.
She walked home slowly. It was a warm evening for the time of year, an evening that had in it just the smallest hint of summer, and there were others making their way home too. Most of them had people to go to, husbands, wives, lovers, parents. Her house awaited her, large and empty, which she knew was the result of choices she had made, but which perhaps were not entirely to be laid at her door. She had not deliberately chosen to fall in love so completely, and so finally, that thereafter no other man would have done. That was something which had happened to her, and the things that happen to us are not always of our making. John Liamor happened, and that meant that she lived with a sentence.
She did not ponder it unduly, nor speak to others of it (although she had spoken to Jamie, unwisely perhaps, the previous evening). It was just how things were, and she made the most of it, which was the moral duty which she thought that all of us had, at least if one believed in duties to self, which she did. If x, then y.
But y?
C H A P T E R N I N E
E
THE FOLLOWING WEEK was uneventful. There was a small amount of work to be done for the review, but with the proofs of the next issue recently sent off to the printers, and with two members of the editorial board out of the country, Isabel was hardly overburdened. She spent much of the time reading, and she also helped Grace in a long-overdue clearing of the attic. But there was still time for thought, and she could not help but return to what she now thought of as the event. The feeling of rawness which had followed that evening was certainly fading, but this now seemed to be replaced by a sense of lack of resolution. Her meeting with Hen and Neil had been unsatisfactory, she decided, and now she was left with nothing more that she could do. There was to be a Fatal Accident Inquiry; she had been informed by the procurator fiscal of the date when this would be held and had been told that as the most immediate witness she would be called to give evidence, but the fiscal had implied that it would be an open-and-shut case.
“I don’t think that there’s much doubt,” he said. “We’ve had evidence that the height of the rail is perfectly adequate and that the only way in which somebody could fall over would be by leanT H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
1 0 1
ing right over. He must have done that, for whatever reason—
perhaps to see if he could see somebody downstairs. So that will be more or less that.”
“Then why hold an enquiry?” she had asked, sitting before the fiscal’s desk in his sparsely furnished office. He had asked her in for an interview, and she had found him in an office marked Deaths, a tall man with a gaunt, unhappy face. On the wall behind him there was a framed photograph. Two young men and two young women sat stiffly in chairs in front of a stone archway: University of Edinburgh, Law Society Committee, read the printed inscription below. One of them was the fiscal, recognisable in his lanky awkwardness. Had he hoped for, or expected, more than this job?
The fiscal looked at Isabel and then looked away. He was the deaths officer for Edinburgh. Deaths. Every day. Deaths. Small and big. Deaths. He would do it for a year, and then back to crime in some place like Airdrie or Bathgate. Every day: crime, cruelty, stretching off into retirement. “What’s the current expression?” he asked, trying not to show his weariness. “Closure? To give closure?”
So that was it. There had been a totally unexpected tragedy in which nobody was to blame. She had happened to witness it, and she had done what she could to explain it to herself. At the end of the day, it remained unexplained and there was nothing more that she could do, other than to accept the situation.
And so she attempted to concentrate on her reading, which, by coincidence, was apposite to the question in hand. A new work had appeared on the limits for moral obligation—a familiar subject which had been given a twist by a group of philosophers who were prepared to argue that the whole emphasis of morality should shift from what we do to what we do not do. This was a potentially burdensome position, which would be uncomfortable 1 0 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h for those who sought a quiet life. It required vigilance and more awareness of the needs of others than Isabel felt that she possessed. It was also the wrong position for one who wanted to forget something. The act of putting something out of one’s mind, in this view, could be an act of deliberate and culpable omission.
It was a frustrating and difficult book to read—all 570 pages of it. Isabel felt tempted to put it aside, or to abandon it alto-gether, but to do this would be to prove the author’s point. Damn him, she thought. He’s cornered me.
When at last she finished the book, she shelved it, feeling a frisson of guilty excitement as she chose for it an obscure corner of a high shelf. She did this on a Saturday afternoon, and decided that her persistence with the annoying book should be rewarded with a trip into town, a visit to one or two galleries, and a cup of coffee and a pastry at a coffee bar in Dundas Street.
She travelled into town by bus. As she approached her stop, which was immediately after Queen Street, she saw Toby walking down the hill, carrying a shopping bag. It was the crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers that she noticed first, and she smiled at the thought that this was what the eye should single out, and she was still smiling when she stepped out of the bus. Toby was now twenty or thirty yards ahead of her. He had not seen her watching him from the bus, which was a relief to Isabel, as she did not feel in a mood to talk to him. But now, as she made her way down the hill a safe distance behind him, she found herself wondering what he had been doing. Shopping, obviously, but where was he going? Toby lived in Manor Place, at the other end of the New Town, and so he was not going home.
How mundane, she thought. How mundane my interest in this rather boring young man. What possible reason do I have to think about how he spends his Saturday afternoons? None. But T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
1 0 3
that was an answer which merely fuelled her curiosity. It would be interesting to find out at least something about him; just to know, for example, that he liked to go to Valvona & Crolla to buy pasta.
Or that he had a habit of nosing about antique shops (unlikely though that was). Perhaps she would warm to him if she knew more about him. Cat had implied that he had depths of which she was unaware, and she should at least open herself to these. (Moral duty to make an extra effort to overcome her prejudice? No. Five hundred and seventy-odd pages were firmly shelved and that subject was not up for discussion on this outing.) Toby walked fairly quickly, and in order to keep a constant distance behind him, Isabel had to increase her pace. She saw him cross Heriot Row and continue down Dundas Street. She was now following him, vaguely aware of the ridiculousness of what she was doing, but enjoying herself nonetheless. He will not go into one of the art shops, she had told herself, and he will certainly not be interested in books. What did that leave? Perhaps the travel agency at the corner of Great King Street (a late skiing trip?).
Suddenly Toby stopped, and Isabel, deep in impermissible thought, found herself to have closed the distance between them. She stopped immediately. Toby was looking into a shopwindow, peering into the glass front as if trying to make out some detail on a displayed object or the figure on a price tag. Isabel looked to her left. She was standing outside a private house rather than a shop, and so the only window which she had available to stare into was a drawing-room window. She stared, so that if Toby should turn round, he would not see her watching him.
It was an elegant, expensively furnished drawing room, typical of that part of the Georgian New Town. As Isabel looked across the fifteen feet or so of space that separated her from the window, a woman’s face appeared and stared back at her in sur-1 0 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h prise. The woman had been sitting in an armchair and had been hidden from sight; now she looked out and saw another woman looking back in at her.
For a moment their eyes met. Isabel froze in her embarrassment. The woman at the window looked vaguely familiar, but she could not quite place her. For a moment neither did anything more, and then, just as an expression of annoyance began to replace the look of surprise on the householder’s face, Isabel dragged her gaze away and looked at her watch. She would put on an act of absentmindedness. Halfway down Dundas Street, she suddenly stopped and tried to remember what it was that she had forgotten. She stood there, staring into space (or a small amount of space) and then she looked at her watch and remembered.
It worked. The woman inside turned away, and Isabel continued down the hill, noticing that Toby had now moved on and was about to cross the street into Northumberland Street. Isabel stopped again, this time with all the legitimacy of a shopwindow before her, and looked into this while Toby completed his crossing.
This was the moment of decision. She could stop this ridiculous pursuit now, while she was still following a route which she could claim, quite truthfully, to have been following already, or she could continue to trace Toby’s steps. She hesitated for a moment and then, looking casually up and down for traffic, she sauntered across the street. But even as she did so, it occurred to her that what she was doing was quite ridiculous. She was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, and she was sidling along an Edinburgh street, in broad daylight, following a young man; she who believed in privacy, who abjured the sheer vulgarity of our nosy, prying age, was behaving like a schoolboy fantasist.
Why was it that she allowed herself to get drawn into the busi-T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
1 0 5
ness of others, like some sordid gumshoe (was that what they called them?).
Northumberland Street was one of the narrower streets in the New Town. Built on a somewhat smaller scale than the streets to the north and the south of it, it had its adherents, who liked what they tended to describe as an “intimacy.” Isabel, by contrast, found it too dark—a street without outlook and without that sense of elevation and grandeur which made living in the New Town so exhilarating. Not that she would choose to live there herself, of course; she preferred the quiet of Merchiston and Morningside, and the pleasure of a garden. She looked up at the house on her right, which she knew when John Pinkerton had lived there. John, who had been an advocate and who knew more about the history of Edinburgh’s architecture than most, had created a house which was flawlessly Georgian in all respects. He had been such an entertaining man, with his curious voice and his tendency to make a noise like a gobbling turkey when he cleared his throat, but had been so generous too, and had lived up to his family motto, which was simply Be Kind. No man had inhabited the city so fully, known all its stones; and he had been so brave on his early deathbed, singing hymns, of all things, perfectly remembered, as he remembered everything. The deathbed: she remembered now that poem that Douglas Young had written for Willie Soutar: Twenty year beddit, and nou/the mort-claith. /
Was his life warth livin? Ay / siccar it was. / He was eident, he was blye / in Scotland’s cause. Just as John had been. Scotland’s cause: Be Kind.
Toby had slowed down now, and was almost strolling. Isabel was concerned that he might turn round at any point, and in this much smaller street, he could hardly fail to notice her. Of course, 1 0 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that need not be unduly embarrassing; there was no reason why she should not be walking down this particular street on a Saturday afternoon, just as he was doing. The only difference between them, she thought, was that he was clearly going somewhere and she had no idea where she would end up.
At the eastern end of Northumberland Street the road took a sharp turn down to the left and became Nelson Street, a rather more promising street, Isabel had always thought. She had known a painter who lived there, in a top-floor flat with skylights that faced north and which admitted a clear light that suffused all his paintings. She had known him and his wife well, and had often gone for dinner with them before they left to live in France.
There he stopped painting, she had heard, and grew vines instead. Then he died suddenly, and his wife married a French-man and moved to Lyons, where her new husband was a judge.
She heard from her from time to time, but after a few years the letters stopped. The judge, she was told by others, had become involved in a corruption scandal and had been sent to prison in Marseilles. The painter’s widow had moved to the south to be able to visit her husband in prison, but had been too ashamed to tell any of her old friends about what had happened. Nelson Street, then, was a street of mixed associations for Isabel.
Swinging his plastic shopping bag as he walked, Toby crossed to the far side of Nelson Street, watched discreetly by a now almost loitering Isabel. He looked up at the tenement building and then briefly glanced at his watch. He was now directly outside a set of five stone steps that led up to the door of one of the ground-floor flats. Isabel saw him pause for a moment, and then he strode up the steps and pushed the button of the large brass bell to the side of the door. She held back now, taking advantage of the cover provided by a van which was parked near the corner T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
1 0 7
of the street. After a moment, the door opened and she saw a young woman, dressed, she thought, in a T-shirt and jeans, come forward from the dark of the hall, momentarily into the light, and there, in Isabel’s full view, lean toward Toby, put her arms round his shoulders, and kiss him.
He did not reel back; of course not. He bent forward in her arms, lowered his shopping bag to the floor, and then embraced her, pushing her gently back into the hallway. Isabel stood quite still. She had not expected this. She had expected nothing. But she had not thought that her whimsical decision of five minutes ago would have led to a conclusive affirmation of her earlier intu-itions about Toby. Unfaithful.
She stood there for a few minutes more, her gaze fixed on the closed door. Then she turned away and walked back up Northumberland Street, feeling dirtied by what she had seen, and by what she had done. In such a way, and with such a heart, must people creep away from brothels or the locus of an illicit assignation; mortal, guilty, as WHA would have it in that grave poem in which he describes the aftermath of the carnal, when sleeping heads might lie, so innocently, upon faithless arms.
C H A P T E R T E N
E
GRACE SAID: “I was standing there at the bus stop, waiting for a bus. They’re meant to come every twelve minutes, but that’s laughable. Laughable. There was a puddle of water on the road and a car went past, driven by a young man in a baseball cap, back to front, and he splashed this woman who was standing next to me. She was soaked through. Dripping. He saw it, you know. But did he stop to apologise? Of course not. What do you expect?”
“I don’t expect anything,” said Isabel, warming her hands round her mug of coffee. “It’s the decline of civility. Or, should I say, it’s the absence of civility.”
“Decline, absence, same thing,” Grace retorted.
“Not quite,” said Isabel. “Decline means less than before.
Absence means not there—maybe never was.”
“Are you telling me that people used not to apologise for splashing other people?” Grace’s indignation showed through.
Her employer, she was convinced, was far too liberal on some matters, including young men in baseball caps.
“Some did, I expect,” said Isabel soothingly. “Others didn’t.
There’s no way of telling whether there are fewer apologisers these days than before. It’s rather like policemen looking younger.
T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
1 0 9
Policemen are the same age as they always were; it’s just that to some of us they look younger.”
Grace was not to be put off by this answer. “Well, I can tell, all right. Policemen are definitely younger, and manners have gone down the cludgie, right down. You see it every day in the street. You’d have to be blind not to notice. Boys need fathers to teach them how to behave.”
The argument, which was taking place in the kitchen, was like all their discussions. Grace defended a proposition and did not move, and they usually ended with a vague concession by Isabel that the matter was very complicated and would have to be thought about, but that Grace was certainly right, up to a point.
Isabel rose to her feet. It was almost ten past nine and the morning crossword called. She picked up the newspaper from the kitchen table, and leaving Grace to continue with the folding of the washing, she made her way to the morning room. Right and wrong. Boys need fathers to teach them the difference between right and wrong. This was true, but like many of Grace’s observations it was only half true. What was wrong with mothers for this role? She knew a number of mothers who had brought up sons by themselves, and brought them up well. One of her friends, deserted by her husband six weeks after the birth of her son, had made a magnificent job of his upbringing, against all the odds which single mothers face. He had turned out well, that boy, as had many others like him. Boys need a parent is what Grace should have said.
Toby had a father, and yet here was Toby two-timing Cat.
Had his father ever said anything to him about how one should behave towards women? It was an interesting question, and Isabel had no idea about whether fathers spoke to their sons about such things. Did fathers take their sons aside and say: 1 1 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“Treat women with respect”? Or was that too old-fashioned? Perhaps she could ask Jamie about this, as he certainly knew how to treat women with respect, unlike Toby.
Isabel suspected that the way men behaved towards women depended on much more complex psychological factors. It was not a question of moral knowledge, she thought; it was more a matter of confidence in self and sexual integration. A man with a fragile ego, unsure of who he is, would treat a woman as a means of combating his insecurity. A man who knew who he was and who was sure of his sexuality would be sensitive to women’s feelings. He would have nothing to prove.
Toby seemed confident, though; in fact, he oozed confidence.
In his case, at least, it was something else—perhaps the absence of a moral imagination. Morality depended on an understanding of the feelings of others. If one had no moral imagination—and there were such people—then one simply would not be able to empathise with them. The pain, the suffering, the unhappiness of others would not seem real, because it would not be perceived.
There was nothing new in this, of course; Hume had been talking about much the same thing when he discussed sympathy and the importance of being able to experience the emotions of others. Isabel wondered whether it would be possible to communi-cate Hume’s insight to people today by talking about vibrations.
Vibrations were a New Age concept. Perhaps Hume could be explained in terms of vibrations and fields of energy, and this would make him real to people who otherwise would have no inkling of what he meant. It was an interesting possibility, but like so many other possibilities, there was no time for it. There were so many books to write—so many ideas to develop—and she had time for none of it.
People thought, quite wrongly, that Isabel had time on her T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
1 1 1
hands. They looked at her situation, that of a woman of independent means, living in a large house, looked after by a full-time housekeeper, and with a part-time job as editor of some obscure journal that presumably had flexible deadlines. How could such a person be busy? they thought. Their own lives, in jobs which made more and more demands, were quite different, they imagined.
Of course, none of these reflections, relevant though they were to the moral issues which informed her life, addressed the quandary in which she now found herself. She had, by indulging in vulgar curiosity, discovered something about Toby of which Cat was presumably ignorant. The question before her now was that utterly trite one, which must have graced the columns of countless problem pages: My best friend’s boyfriend is cheating on her. I know this, but she does not. Should I tell her?
It may have been a familiar problem, but the answer was far from clear. She had faced it before, a long time ago, and she was not sure whether she had made the right decision. In that case, the knowledge had not been of unfaithfulness, but of illness. A man with whom she had worked, and with whom over the years she had become reasonably friendly, had developed schizophre-nia. He had been unable to continue working, but had responded well to treatment. He had then met a woman, to whom he proposed, and she had accepted. Isabel had decided that this woman was very keen to get married, but had never before been asked.
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