The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That just came out. I didn’t mean that.”

  Jamie had put his knife and fork down beside his plate. He was staring at the omelette. And he had started to cry.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OH MY GOODNESS, Jamie. I’m so sorry. That was a terrible thing to say. I had no idea that you would …”

  Jamie shook his head vigorously. He was not crying loudly, but there were tears. “No,” he said, wiping at his eyes with his handkerchief. “It’s not that at all. It’s not what you said. It’s nothing to do with it.”

  Isabel sighed with relief. She had not offended him, then, but what could have provoked this rather extraordinary outburst of emotion on his part?

  Jamie picked up his knife and fork and started to cut into his omelette, but put them down again.

  “It’s the salad,” he said. “You’ve put in raw onion. My eyes are really sensitive to that. I can’t go anywhere near raw onion.”

  Isabel let out a peal of laughter. “Thank God. I thought that those were real tears and that I’d said a dreadful, insensitive thing to you. I thought that it was my fault.” She reached forward and took the plate away from the place in front of him. Then she scraped off the salad, and gave it back to him. “Just an omelette. As nature intended. Nothing else.”

  “That’s perfect,” he said. “I’m sorry about that. It’s genetic, I think. My mother had exactly the same problem, and a cousin of hers too. We’re allergic to raw onion.”

  “And I thought for a moment that it had something to do with Cat … and with the time you cooked dinner for the two of us in Saxe-Coburg Street.”

  Jamie, who had been smiling, now looked pensive. “I remember,” he said.

  Isabel had not intended to mention Cat, but now she had, and she knew what the next question would be. He always asked it, whenever she saw him.

  “What is Cat up to?” he asked. “What is she doing?”

  Isabel reached for her glass and poured herself some wine. She had not intended to drink anything more after her sherry with Neil, but there in the intimacy of the kitchen, with the yeasty smell of mushrooms assailing her nostrils, she decided otherwise; akrasia, weakness of the will, again. It would feel safe sitting there with Jamie, talking to him and sipping at a glass of wine. She knew that it would make her feel better.

  “Cat,” she said, “is doing what she always does. She’s quite busy in the shop. She’s getting on with life.” She trailed off weakly. It was such a trite reply, but what more was there to say? To ask such a question, anyway, was the equivalent of asking “How are you?” on meeting a friend. One expects only one answer, an anodyne assurance that all is well, later qualified, perhaps, by some remark about the real situation, if the real situation is quite different. Stoicism first, and then the truth, might be the way in which this could be expressed.

  “And that man she’s seeing,” said Jamie quietly. “Toby. What about him? Does she bring him round here?”

  “The other day,” said Isabel. “I saw him the other day. But not here.”

  Jamie reached for his glass. He was frowning, as if struggling to find precisely the right words. “Where, then?”

  “In town,” Isabel replied quickly. She hoped that this would be the end of this line of questioning, but it was not.

  “Was he … was he with Cat? With her?”

  “No,” said Isabel. “He was by himself.” She thought: That is, he was by himself to begin with.

  Jamie stared at her. “What was he doing?”

  Isabel smiled. “You seem very interested in him,” she said. “And he’s not really very interesting at all, I’m afraid.” She hoped that this aside would reassure him as to whose side she was on, and that the conversation might move on. But it had the opposite effect. Jamie appeared to interpret it as paving the way for further discussion.

  “What was he doing, then?”

  “He was walking along the street. That’s all. Walking along the street … in those crushed-strawberry corduroys that he likes to wear.” The last part of her answer was unnecessary; it was sarcastic, and Isabel immediately regretted it. That was two unpleasant things she had said tonight, she thought. The first was that gratuitous remark about men not cooking; the second was an unworthy remark about Toby’s trousers. It was easy, terribly easy, to become with time a middle-aged spinster with a sharp tongue. She would have to guard against this. So she added, “They’re not too bad, crushed-strawberry corduroys. Presumably Cat likes them. She must …”

  Again she stopped herself. She had been about to say that Cat must have found crushed-strawberry corduroys attractive, but that would have been tactless. It implied, did it not, that Jamie, and his trousers did not measure up. She allowed herself a furtive glance at Jamie’s trousers. She had never noticed them before, largely because her interest in Jamie lay not in his trousers, but in his face, and his voice. In fact, it lay in the whole person; and that, surely, was the difference between Toby and Jamie. You could not like Toby as a person (unless you yourself were the wrong sort of person); you could only like him for his physique. Yes, she thought, that’s all. Toby was a sex object in crushed-strawberry corduroys, that’s all he was. And Jamie, by contrast, was … well, Jamie was just beautiful, with those high cheekbones of his and his skin and his voice which must surely melt the heart. And she wondered, too, what they were like as lovers. Toby would be all vigour while Jamie would be quiet, and gentle, and caressing, like a woman really. Which might be a problem, perhaps, but not one that she could realistically do very much about. For a few moments, a few completely impermissible moments, she thought: I could teach him. And then she stopped. Such thoughts were as unacceptable as imagining people being crushed by avalanches. Avalanches. The roar. The sudden confusion of crushed strawberry. The tidal wave of snow, and then the preternatural quiet.

  “Did you speak to him?” asked Jamie.

  Isabel returned from her thoughts. “Speak to whom?”

  “To … Toby.” It clearly involved some effort for him to bring himself to pronounce the name.

  Isabel shook her head. “No,” she said. “I just saw him.” This, of course, was a half-truth. There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one. Isabel had herself written a short article on the matter, following the publication of Sissela Bok’s philosophical monograph Lying. She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position. Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where there was an obligation, based on a reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure. There was no duty to reveal everything in response to a casual question by one who had no right to the information.

  “You’re blushing,” said Jamie. “You’re not telling me something.”

  So that, thought Isabel, was that. The whole edifice of philosophical debate on the fine nuances of truth telling is ultimately undermined by a simple biological process. Tell a fib and you go red in the face. It sounded so much less dignified than it did in the pages of Sissela Bok, but it was absolutely true. All the great issues were reducible to the simple facts of everyday human life and the trite metaphors, the axiomata, by which people lived. The international economic system and its underlying assumptions: Finders keepers, losers weepers. The uncertainty of life: Step on a crack and the bears will get you (which she had believed in so vividly as a child, walking up Morningside Road with Fersie McPherson, her nurse, carefully avoiding the cracks in the pavement).

  “If I’m blushing,” she said, “it’s because I’m not telling you the whole truth. For which I apologise. I didn’t tell you what I did because I feel embarrassed about it, and for …” She hesitated. There was another reason for not revealing what had happened, but now she had embarked on the road of disclosure; she would have to tell Jamie ev
erything. He would sense it if she did not, and she did not want him to feel that she did not trust him. Did she trust him? Yes, she did. Of course she did. A young man like that, with his en brosse hair and his voice, could only be trustworthy. Jamies can be trusted; Tobys cannot.

  Jamie watched her as she spoke. Now she continued: “… for the reason that there is something that I did not want you to know. Not because I don’t trust you, which I do, but because I think that it has nothing to do with us. I saw something that we cannot do anything about. So I thought that there was no reason to tell you.”

  “What is it?” he asked. “You have to tell me now. You can’t leave it at that.”

  Isabel nodded. He was right. She could not leave the matter like this. “When I saw Toby in town,” she began, “he was walking down Dundas Street. I was on a bus and I saw him. I decided to follow him—please don’t ask me why, because I don’t know if I can give an adequate explanation for that. Sometimes one just does things—ridiculous things—that one can’t explain. So I decided to follow him.

  “He walked down Northumberland Street. Then, when we got to Nelson Street, he crossed the road and rang the bell on a ground-floor flat. There was a girl who came to the door. He embraced her, pretty passionately I think, and then the door closed, and that was that.”

  Jamie looked at her. For a moment he said nothing, then, very slowly, he lifted his glass and took a sip of his wine. Isabel noticed the fine hands and, for a moment, in his eyes, the reflected light from the wineglass.

  “His sister,” he said quietly. “He has a sister who lives in Nelson Street. I’ve actually met her. She’s a friend of a friend.”

  Isabel sat quite still. She had not expected this. “Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  YES,” SAID JAMIE. “Toby has a sister in Nelson Street. She works in the same property company as my friend does. They’re both surveyors—not the sort who go out with theodolites, but valuers.” He laughed. “And you thought that the result of your gumshoe activities was that you had discovered Toby being unfaithful. Ha! I wish you had, Isabel, but you haven’t. That’ll teach you to follow people.”

  Isabel had now recovered sufficient composure to laugh at herself. “I more or less hid behind a parked van,” she said. “You should have seen me.”

  Jamie smiled. “It must have been exciting stuff. Pity about the result, but there we are.”

  “Well,” said Isabel. “I enjoyed myself anyway. And it teaches me a lesson about having a nasty, suspicious mind.”

  “Which you don’t have,” said Jamie. “You are not suspicious. You are absolutely straight down the middle.”

  “You’re very kind,” said Isabel. “But I have bags of failings. Same as anybody else. Bags.”

  Jamie lifted up his glass again. “She’s quite a nice girl, his sister,” he said. “I met her at a party which Roderick—that’s my surveyor friend—gave a few months ago. It was a rather different crowd of people from my own crowd, but it was good fun. And I thought that she was rather nice. Very attractive. Very tall, with blonde hair. A model type.”

  Isabel said nothing. Then she closed her eyes, and imagined herself for a moment on the corner of Nelson Street, half hidden by the van, seeing Toby at the door, and the door opening. She could picture it quite clearly, as she had always been able to recall visual details with accuracy. Now the picture was clear. The door opened and the girl appeared. She was not tall, for Toby had stooped to embrace her, and she did not have blonde hair. Her hair, quite unmistakeably, was dark. Black or brown. Not blonde.

  She opened her eyes. “It was not his sister,” she said. “It was somebody else.”

  Jamie was silent. Isabel imagined the conflict within him: displeasure, or even anger, at the fact that Cat was being deceived, and satisfaction that there was now a chance that Toby could be exposed. He would be thinking, too, it occurred to her, that he might be able to take Toby’s place, which is what she herself had thought. But she at least knew that it would not be that simple; Jamie was unlikely to know that. He would be optimistic.

  Isabel decided to take the initiative. “You can’t tell her,” she said. “If you went and told her, she would be angry with you. Even if she believes it—which she may not—she would feel like shooting the messenger. I guarantee that you would regret it.”

  “But she should know,” protested Jamie. “It’s … it’s outrageous that he should be carrying on with somebody else. She should be told. We owe it to her.”

  “There are some things one has to find out oneself,” said Isabel. “You have to let people make some mistakes themselves.”

  “Well, I for one don’t accept that,” Jamie retorted. “This is a simple case. He’s a dog. We know it; she doesn’t. We have to tell her.”

  “But the whole point is that if we do that, we’re only going to anger her. Don’t you see? Even if she went and found out that what we said was true, she would still be angry with us for telling her. I don’t want her to … to write you off. But she will if you do that.”

  Jamie thought about what she had said. So she wanted him to get back with Cat. She had never actually said as much, but now it was in the open. And it was just as he had hoped it would be.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I see what you mean.” He paused. “But why do you think he’s two-timing her? If he likes this other girl—she’s presumably his sister’s flatmate—then why doesn’t he just go off with her? Why use Cat like this?”

  “Don’t you see?” said Isabel.

  “No, I don’t. Maybe I just don’t get it.”

  “Cat is wealthy,” said Isabel. “Cat owns a business, and quite a bit else—a lot else actually, as you may or may not know. If you were somebody who was interested in money, and Toby is, I should think, then you may want to get your hands on some of it.”

  Jamie’s astonishment was obvious. “He’s after her money?”

  Isabel nodded. “I’ve known quite a few cases like that. I’ve seen people marry for money and then think that they can behave as they like. They get the security of the money and carry on behind their wife’s or husband’s back. It’s not all that unusual. Think of all those young women who marry wealthy older men. Do you think they behave like nuns?”

  “I suppose not,” said Jamie.

  “Well, there you are. Of course, this is only one explanation. The other is that he simply wants to play the field. It’s possible that he really likes Cat, but that he likes other women too. That’s perfectly possible.”

  Isabel refilled Jamie’s glass. They were getting through the bottle quite quickly, but it was turning into an emotional evening and the wine was helping. There was another bottle in the fridge if needed, and they could broach that later. As long as I keep control, thought Isabel. As long as I maintain enough of a level head so that I don’t tell Jamie that if the truth be told, I’m half in love with him myself, and that there is nothing I would like more than to kiss that brow and run my fingers over that hair and hold him against me.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Grace, who arrived early, said to herself: two glasses, an empty bottle. Crossing to the fridge, she saw the half-full corked bottle, and added, And a half. She opened the dishwasher and saw the omelette plate and the knife and fork, which told her that the visitor was Jamie: Isabel always cooked an omelette when he stayed for dinner. Grace was glad that Isabel had that young man in. She liked him, and she knew the background with Cat. She suspected, too, what Isabel was planning; that she would be plotting to get the two of them together again. She could forget that. People rarely went back that way. Once you were off somebody, then you tended to stay off them. That, at least, was Grace’s experience. She had rarely found that she rehabilitated somebody once she had taken the decision to write them off.

  She prepared the coffee. Isabel would be down soon, and she liked to have the coffee ready for her when she came into the kitchen. The Scotsman had arrived and Grace had brought it through from the f
ront hall, where it was lying on the mosaic floor beneath the letter box. Now it was on the table, front page up, and Grace glanced at it while she ladled the coffee into the percolator. A resignation had been called for from a Glasgow politician suspected of fraud. (No surprise, thought Grace; none at all.) And there beneath it, a picture of that person of whom Isabel did not approve, the popinjay, as she called him. He had been crossing Princes Street and had collapsed, to be rushed off to the Infirmary. Grace read on: it had been a suspected heart attack, but no—and this was truly astonishing—he was found to have suffered a large split in his side, fortunately dealt with by quick and competent surgical stitching. He had made a full recovery, but then the diagnosis had been revealed: he had burst with self-importance.

  Grace put down the coffee spoon. Surely not. Impossible. She picked up the newspaper to examine it further, and saw the date. The first of April. She smiled. The Scotsman’s little joke—how funny; but how apt.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IN SPITE OF THE FACT that he had drunk three glasses of wine and Isabel was towards the end of her second, Jamie had at first been doubtful about Isabel’s proposition, but she had won him over, wheedling him, persuading him that they should at least give it a try.

  To do what? To go to see Paul Hogg, of course, as the first step in finding out what it was that Mark Fraser had discovered, and about whom he had discovered it. Sitting at the kitchen table, the chanterelle omelette consumed, Jamie had listened intently as she explained to him about the conversation with Neil, and about how she felt that she could not ignore what he had revealed. She wanted to take the matter further, but she did not want to do it by herself. It would be safer, she said, with two, although the nature of the danger, if any, was not expanded upon.