The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “And yet the real reason may well have been what Minty said to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s no chance of proving that money changed hands between Cameron and Minty?”

  Johnny looked surprised. “I don’t think that money would necessarily change hands—unless he was sharing his bonus with her. No, I think it more likely that they were doing this for mixed motives. She was involved with him sexually and wanted to keep him. That’s perfectly possible. People give their lovers things because they’re their lovers. That’s an old story.”

  “Or?” prompted Isabel.

  “Or Minty was genuinely concerned about Paul Hogg’s department getting into the mire and wanted to give it a boost because Paul Hogg was part of her overall plan to penetrate the heart of the Edinburgh establishment. It was not in her interests as the future Mrs. Paul Hogg to have hitched her star to a has-been.”

  Isabel mulled over what she had been told. “So what you’re telling me, then, is that there may well have been insider trading, but that we’re never going to be able to prove it? Is that it?”

  Johnny nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s about it. You could try to take a closer look at Minty’s financial situation and see if there are any unexplained windfalls, but I don’t see how you’ll get that information. She’ll bank at Adam & Company, I suspect, and they are very discreet and you’d never get round any of their staff—they’re very correct. So what do you do?”

  “Shrug the whole thing off?”

  Johnny sighed. “I suspect that’s all we can do. I don’t like it, but I don’t think that we’ll be able to do anything more.”

  Isabel lifted her glass and took a sip of her whisky. She had not wanted to mention her real suspicions to Johnny, but she felt grateful to him for the enquiries that he had made and she wanted to confide in somebody other than Jamie. If Johnny thought that her theory about what had happened in the Usher Hall was farfetched, then perhaps she should abandon it.

  She put her glass down on the table. “Would you mind if I tell you something?” she asked.

  Johnny gestured airily. “Anything you wish. I know how to be discreet.”

  “A little while ago,” said Isabel, “a young man fell to his death from the gods in the Usher Hall. You probably read about it.”

  Johnny thought for a moment before he replied. “I think I remember something like that. Horrible.”

  “Yes,” Isabel went on. “It was very distressing. I happened to be there at the time—not that that’s relevant—but what is interesting is that he worked at McDowell’s. He would have gone there after you had left, but he was in Paul Hogg’s department.”

  Johnny had raised his glass to his lips and was watching Isabel over the rim. “I see.”

  He’s not interested, thought Isabel. “I became involved,” she went on. “I happened to be told by somebody who knew him well that he had discovered something very awkward for somebody in the firm.” She paused. Johnny was looking away, watching Charlie Maclean.

  “And so he was pushed over that balcony,” she said quietly. “Pushed.”

  Johnny turned round to face her. She could not make out his expression; he was interested now but the interest was tinged with incredulity, she thought.

  “Very unlikely,” he said after a while. “People don’t do that sort of thing. They just don’t.”

  Isabel sighed. “I believe that they might,” she said. “And that’s why I wanted to find out about Minty and this insider trading. It could all add up.”

  Johnny shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think that you should let go of it. I really don’t think this is going to get you anywhere.”

  “I’ll think about it. But I’m very grateful to you, anyway.”

  Johnny acknowledged her thanks with a lowering of his eyes. “And if you want to get in touch with me, here’s my mobile number. Give me a call anytime. I’m up and about until midnight every day.”

  He handed her a card on which a number had been scrawled, and Isabel tucked it into her bag.

  “Let’s go and hear what Charlie Maclean has to say,” said Johnny, rising to his feet.

  “Wet straw,” said Charlie at the other end of the room, putting his nose into the mouth of the glass. “Smell this dram, everyone. Wet straw, which means a Borders distillery in my book. Wet straw.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  OF COURSE JOHNNY was right, Isabel thought—and she had decided accordingly by the following morning. That was the end of it; she would never be able to prove insider trading by Minty Auchterlonie, and even if she did, it would still be necessary to link this with Mark’s death. Johnny knew these people much better than she did, and he had been incredulous of her theory. She should accept that, and let the whole matter rest.

  She had reached this conclusion sometime during the night of the whisky tasting, when she had woken up, stared at the shadows on the ceiling for a few minutes, and finally made her decision. Sleep followed shortly afterwards, and the next morning—a brilliant morning on the cusp of spring and summer—she felt an extraordinary freedom, as one does at the end of an examination, when the pen and pencil are put away and nothing more remains to be done. Her time was her own now; she could devote herself to the review and to the pile of books that was stacked invitingly in her study; she could treat herself to morning coffee in Jenners, and watch the well-heeled Edinburgh ladies engage in their gossip, a world which she might so easily have slipped into and which she had avoided by a deliberate act of self-determining choice—thank heavens. And yet, was she any happier than they were, these women with their safe husbands and their children who were set to become like their parents and perpetuate this whole, self-confident world of haut-bourgeois Edinburgh? Probably not; they were happy in their way (I must not be condescending, she thought), and she was happy in hers. And Grace in hers and Jamie in his, and Minty Auchterlonie … She stopped herself, and thought. Minty Auchterlonie’s state of mind is simply no concern of mine. No, she would not go to Jenners that morning, but she would walk into Bruntsfield and buy something that smelled nice from Mellis’s cheese shop and then drink a cup of coffee in Cat’s delicatessen. Then, that evening, there was a lecture she could attend at the Royal Museum of Scotland. Professor Lance Butler of the University of Pau, a lecturer whom she had heard before and who was consistently entertaining, would speak on Beckett, as he always did. That was excitement enough for one day.

  And of course there were the crosswords. Downstairs now, she retrieved the newspapers from the mat on the hall and glanced at the headlines. NEW CONCERN FOR COD STOCKS, she read on the front page of The Scotsman, and saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what culture would a generation of computer operators leave behind them? She answered her own question: more than one might imagine—an electronic culture of e-mail tales and computer-generated images, fleeting and derivative, but a culture nonetheless.

  She turned to the crossword, recognising several clues immediately. The falls, artist is confusingly preceded again (7), which required no more than a moment’s thought: Niagara. Such a cliché in the crossword world, and this irritated Isabel, who liked novelty, however weak, in clues. And then, to pile Pelion (6) upon Ossa (4), there was Writers I shortly have, thoughtful (7). Isabel was pensive, which solved that one, until she tripped up over An unending Greek god leads to an exclamation, Mother! (6). This could only be zeugma—Zeu(s) g (gee!) ma—a word with which she was unfamiliar, and it sent her to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which confirmed her suspicion. She liked Fowler (avian hunter of words, she thought) for his opinions, which were clear and directive. Zeugmata, he explained, were a bad thing and incorrect—unlike syllepses, with which they were commonly confused. So Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair was sylleptical, requiring a single word to be understood in a differe
nt sense, while See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned was a zeugma and called for the insertion of another quite different verb, surrounded, which was not there.

  By the time that Grace arrived, Isabel had finished her breakfast and had dealt with the morning mail. Grace, who was late, arrived in a state of anxiety and a taxi; a sylleptical arrival, Isabel noted. Grace was strict about punctuality and hated to be even a few minutes late, hence the costly taxi and the anxiety.

  “The battery of my alarm clock,” she explained as she came into the kitchen, where Isabel was sitting. “You never think of changing them, and then they die on you.”

  Isabel had already prepared the coffee and she poured her housekeeper a cup, while Grace tidied her hair in front of the small mirror that she had hung on the wall beside the pantry door.

  “I was at my meeting last night,” Grace said, as she took her first sip of coffee. “There were more people there than usual. And a very good medium—a woman from Inverness—who was quite remarkable. She got right to the heart of things. It was quite uncanny.”

  Grace went on the first Wednesday of each month to a spiritualist meeting in a street off Queensferry Place. Once or twice she had invited Isabel to accompany her but Isabel, who feared that she might laugh, had declined the invitation and Grace had not persevered. Isabel did not approve of mediums, who she felt were, for the most part, charlatans. It seemed to her that many of the people who went to such meetings (although not Grace) had lost somebody and were desperate for contact beyond the grave. And rather than help them to let go, these mediums encouraged them to think that the dead could be contacted. In Isabel’s view it was cruel and exploitative.

  “This woman from Inverness,” Grace went on, “she’s called Annie McAllum. You can tell that she’s a medium just by looking at her. She has that Gaelic colouring—you know, the dark hair and the translucent skin. And green eyes too. You can tell that she has the gift. You can tell.”

  “But I thought that anybody could be a medium,” said Isabel. “You don’t have to be one of those fey Highlanders to do it.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Grace. “We had a woman from Birmingham once. Even from a place like that. The gift can be received by anyone.”

  Isabel suppressed a smile. “And what did this Annie McAllum have to say?”

  Grace looked out the window. “It’s almost summer,” she said.

  Isabel stared at her in astonishment. “That’s what she said? Now, that’s really something. You have to have the gift to work that out.”

  Grace laughed. “Oh no. I was just looking out at the magnolia. I said that it’s almost summer. She said lots of things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well,” said Grace, “there’s a woman called Lady Strath-martin who comes to the meetings. She’s well into her seventies now and she’s been coming to the meetings for years apparently, since well before I joined. She lost her husband, you see, quite a long time ago—he was a judge—and she likes to contact him on the other side.”

  Isabel said nothing, and Grace continued. “She lives in Ainslie Place, on the north side, and the Italian consul, a woman, lives below her. They go to a lot of things together, but she’s never brought the consul to our meetings until last night. And so she was sitting there, in the circle, and Annie McAllum suddenly turned to her and said: I can see Rome. Yes, I can see Rome. I caught my breath at that. That was amazing. And then she said: Yes, I think that you’re in touch with Rome.”

  There was a silence as Grace looked expectantly at Isabel and Isabel stared mutely at Grace. Eventually Isabel spoke. “Well,” she said cautiously, “perhaps that’s not all that surprising. She is, after all, the Italian consul, and you would normally expect the Italian consul to be in touch with Rome, wouldn’t you?”

  Grace shook her head, not in denial of the proposition that Italian consuls were in touch with Rome, but with the air of one who was expected to explain something very simple which simply had not been grasped. “But she wasn’t to know that she was the Italian consul,” she said. “How would somebody from Inverness know that this woman was the Italian consul? How would she have known?”

  “What was she wearing?” asked Isabel.

  “A white gown,” said Grace. “It’s really a white sheet, made up into a gown.”

  “The Italian consul? A white gown?”

  “No,” said Grace, again with a patient look. “The mediums often put on a gown like that. It helps them make contact. No, the Italian consul was wearing a very smart dress, if I remember correctly. A smart dress and smart Italian shoes.”

  “There you are,” said Isabel.

  “I don’t see how that makes any difference,” said Grace.

  HAD GRACE HAD the gift, then she might have said: Expect a telephone call from a man who lives in Great King Street, which is what happened that morning at eleven. Isabel was in her study by then, having postponed the walk into Bruntsfield until noon, and was engrossed in a manuscript on the ethics of memory. She set aside her manuscript reluctantly and answered the call. She had not expected Paul Hogg to telephone her, nor had she anticipated the invitation to drinks early that evening—a totally impromptu party, he pointed out, with no notice at all.

  “Minty’s keen that you should come,” he said. “You and your friend, that young man. She really hopes that you’ll be able to make it.”

  Isabel thought quickly. She was no longer interested in Minty; she had taken the decision to abandon the whole issue of insider trading and Mark’s death, and she was not sure whether she should now accept an invitation which appeared to lead her directly back into engagement with the very people she had decided were no concern of hers. And yet there was an awful fascination in the prospect of seeing Minty up close, as one viewed a specimen. She was an awful woman—there was no doubt about that—but there could be a curious attraction in the awful, as there was in a potentially lethal snake. One liked to look at it, to stare into its eyes. So she accepted, adding that she was not sure whether Jamie would be free, but she would ask him. Paul Hogg sounded pleased, and they agreed on a time. There would only be one or two other people there, he said, and the party would be over in good time for her to make her way up to the museum and Professor Butler’s lecture.

  She returned to the article on the ethics of memory, abandoning the thought of the walk to Bruntsfield. The author of the paper was concerned with the extent to which the forgetting of personal information about others represented a culpable failure to commit the information to memory. “There is a duty to at least attempt to remember,” he wrote, “that which is important to others. If we are in a relationship of friendship or dependence, then you should at least bother about my name. You may fail to remember it, and that may be a matter beyond your control—a nonculpable weakness on your part—but if you made no effort to commit it to memory in the first place, then you have failed to give me something which is my due, recognition on your part of an important aspect of my identity.” Now this was certainly right: our names are important to us, they express our essence. We are protective of our names and resent their mishandling: Charles may not like being called Chuck, and Margaret may not approve of Maggie. To Chuck or Maggie a Charles or a Margaret in the face of their discomfort is to wrong them in a particularly personal way; it is to effect a unilateral change in what they really are.

  Isabel paused in this line of thought and asked herself: What is the name of the author of this paper I am reading? She realised that she did not know, and had not bothered with it when she had taken the manuscript from the envelope. Had she failed in a duty to him? Would he have expected her to have his name in her mind while she read his work? He probably would.

  She thought about this for a few minutes, and then rose to her feet. She could not concentrate, and she certainly owed the author her undivided attention. Instead she was thinking of what lay ahead: a drinks party in Paul Hogg’s flat that had clearly been engineered by Minty Auchterlonie. Minty had been flu
shed out, that at least was clear; but it was not clear to Isabel what she should now do. Her instinct was to abide by her decision to disengage. I need to forget all this, she thought; I need to forget, in an act of deliberate forgetting (if such a thing is really possible). The act of a mature moral agent, an act of recognition of the moral limits of duty to others … but what, she wondered, would Minty Auchterlonie be wearing? Now she laughed at herself. I am a philosopher, Isabel thought, but I am also a woman, and women, as even men know, are interested in what others wear. That is not something of which women should be ashamed; it is men who have the gap in their vision, rather as if they did not notice the plumage of the birds or the shape of the clouds in the sky, or the red of the fox on the wall as he sneaked past Isabel’s window. Brother Fox.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SHE MET JAMIE at the end of Great King Street, having seen him walking up the hill, across the slippery cobbles of Howe Street.

  “I’m very glad that you could make it,” she said. “I’m not sure that I could face these people on my own.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “This is rather like going into the lion’s den, isn’t it?”

  “Lioness,” corrected Isabel. “A bit, maybe. But then I don’t think that we shall pursue anything. I’ve decided that I’m not going to get any further into all this.”

  Jamie was surprised. “You’re dropping it?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I had a long chat with somebody called Johnny Sanderson last night. He worked with these people and knows them well. He says that we won’t be able to prove anything and he also poured cold water on the idea that Minty had anything to do with Mark’s death. I thought long and hard about it. He rather brought me to my senses, I suppose.”