The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “And so do bulbs,” said Grace.

  Isabel almost said, “It’s my garden, and if I want to let the fox dig things up, then that’s my affair.” But she did not. She could have said it, as it was true, and it was perfectly reasonable that one should allow a fox free rein of one’s garden if one liked foxes, which she did. But she had never asserted her rights as employer and owner, and never would. Grace was treated as a colleague; requests to do things were never given as orders, and most of all Isabel never acted as if her money gave her power. It did—and she knew it—but she never abused it. Yet there were limits, which both understood. Grace could not call the man from Dalkeith to deal with Brother Fox because the garden was not hers; both understood that.

  Now, sitting in the second row of the lecture theatre, she put the fox painting out of her mind and looked about her. Edward Mendelson’s lecture had been widely publicised by the Scottish Poetry Library and by The Scotsman, with the result that several hundred people had bought tickets, and even if the lecture theatre would not be full, it would not look empty. She felt relieved; she had been to enough philosophy lectures where a small turnout had brought embarrassment to both speakers and hosts. In Cambridge there had been a professor who had always said the same thing on such occasions, even on fine days: This weather keeps people in and It’s so hard for people these days. That had been greeted with nods of understanding, but she had always wondered why it was so hard for people these days. Was it any harder to attend a philosophy lecture than it had ever been? Surely not; if anything, it would be easier. Lecture theatres in the past had always been uncomfortable, perhaps deliberately so, in order to keep the audience attentive. The old anatomy lecture theatre in the university was famous for its discomfort; narrow, knee-bending benches racked steeply, almost vertiginously upwards—the better to allow a view, of course, of the dissection below, but hardly comfortable. And other lecture theatres had been little better; no soft seats, cold, noisy in the wrong way; everything that the modern lecture theatre or seminar room now eschewed. No, it was not hard for people these days, or rather, if life was still hard, then it was less hard than it had ever been before.

  She looked up at the ceiling. Who had said You’ve never had it so good? Harold Macmillan, a long time ago—and he had been addressing the electorate. Politicians did not speak like that to the electorate these days. They might well say I know how hard it is for people these days, and people would like that, because they did feel that it was hard. And for some, many indeed, it was.

  There was a programme, which she now studied in the lecture theatre’s dim light. Edward Mendelson, it announced, is the literary executor of W. H. Auden and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous critical works on Auden and is editing the poet’s Complete Works. His subject tonight is guilt, neurosis, and the elucidation of a moral standpoint.

  Guilt, thought Isabel, and found herself wondering what Marcus would be doing now—while she was sitting in this lecture theatre, he would be slumped in his armchair, she imagined, just as he had been when she visited their flat; sitting and staring out over the top of Princes Street to the hills of Fife beyond. He’s innocent, she thought. He’s an innocent man wrongly condemned to shame and the end of the career that had been his life.

  Of course, there were other innocent men suffering for things they did not do. Isabel wondered what proportion of those in prison were innocent of the crimes of which they had been convicted. She had read somewhere that the figure for this was between five and ten percent, which meant that at least one in twenty of those in prison had simply not done what they were accused of doing. And in places where they executed people, then presumably some at least of those who faced death did so as innocent people. Did those who signed the death warrants or turned down the last-minute appeals for clemency ever think, This might be an innocent man?

  She could not help the innocent in prison, but she could help a man who had been otherwise unjustly punished. Or, rather, she could try.

  EDWARD MENDELSON delivered his lecture. Auden, he said, had a strong sense of guilt, which was neurotic in origin. There was plenty of evidence for that in the poems, but should we concern ourselves with the roots of the poet’s engagement with morality, or should we look rather at what the great artist has done to transform his personal neuroses into a vision of moral truth that we all can share? He put the question, and Isabel, from the second row, made her own choice without having to think about it very much. The work of art was what mattered to her—the moral statement that helped us to live better, which is what, she believed, the purpose of art was. She was not interested in the doubts and infirmities that preceded the lines that minted a truth: it was the lines themselves that mattered, and we should not diminish their force by diminishing the poet. Auden behaved badly on occasion, as we all did. He lived in domestic squalor, his personal conversation could be arch, he worshipped punctuality, he became irritable. But none of that diminished the truth of what he said. And there were other writers whose personal lives did not bear examination. At least Auden managed money sensibly. Writers—and musicians—generally handled money badly.

  She slipped out at the end of the lecture. A well-known Edinburgh bore, famous for his buttonholing of distinguished visitors, had positioned himself at the foot of the steps that led down from the stage. There would be no escape for Edward Mendelson now unless the organisers of the lecture were prepared to be ruthless and sweep their guest past the bore; push him over, perhaps. She glanced over her shoulder as she left the theatre: a phalanx had assembled around the lecturer and somebody was gesturing for him to accompany them, but the bore was on to them, and like a rugby forward he nimbly dodged past the literary editor of The Scotsman, wove past the professor of English literature, and positioned himself in front of Edward Mendelson. “Professor Mendelson, something you said rather interested me…”

  Isabel walked out of the lecture theatre bemused. The bore was an earnest man who believed in a civilised society of conversation and debate, an Edinburgh of the Scottish Enlightenment; but such an Edinburgh would always exclude those who tried too hard. So he had become a lonely man, accustomed to the glassy looks of others; she should make more effort with him, she thought, because all of us should take on our allocation of lame ducks. But the last time she had seen him, at the opening of a special exhibition at the Royal Scottish Museum, he had addressed her on the subject of wind farms, and as he spoke she had suddenly formed a mental image of the bore talking endlessly at high volume, while before him spun round the blades of a small power-generating windmill, driven by the hot air.

  She detached herself from the crowd milling round the entrance to the lecture theatre and made her way out into George Square. It was not yet Festival time, but a small group of men was already erecting the Spiegeltent in the gardens of the square; later there would be marquees, crowds, and performers, talented and otherwise. She walked along the cobbled lane in front of the university library; a student, engaged in conversation on a mobile phone, gestured to emphasise his point. He was angry, thought Isabel, and she wondered what the cause of his anger could be. Betrayal? Infidelity? The selfishness of a flat-mate? She wanted to say to him: Does it really matter? But it did matter, of course, as these small things do.

  She walked on and became aware that somebody was walking immediately behind her. She slowed down, and the person behind her drew abreast. She glanced sideways: Nick Smart.

  His manner was casual. “I saw you at the lecture,” he said. “I was surprised.”

  She looked at him quickly, but did not keep eye contact. It annoyed her that he should be surprised to see her at the lecture; Auden was her poet, and this was her city. Why should he be surprised? Was it because he thought that she was somehow unworthy of Auden?

  “I wouldn’t have thought he was your sort of poet,” Nick went on.

  Isabel stopped. She turned to face him. “Why do you say that?” she
demanded. She felt hot—and angry.

  Nick shrugged. “Just not your sort.”

  She suddenly thought: He’s laying claim to him, and I’m excluded.

  “What sort of poet would you expect me to like?” she asked, and then, “I find that sort of assumption rather irritating…”

  Her reply did not seem to disturb him. That smug expression, she thought; that demeanour of condescension. But then his expression changed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  She started to walk again, and he continued with her; they were stuck with one another at least until the end of the lane, unless one of them were to turn and walk back.

  “Don’t think about it,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “You’ve taken against me,” said Nick. “I don’t know what I’ve done, but you’ve taken against me.”

  “I don’t know why you think that,” said Isabel. Of course I have, she thought, but how can one confess pure dislike—to the object of the dislike?

  Nick shook his head. “Maybe I’m imagining it.”

  “Maybe.”

  They had reached the end of the lane, and Isabel began to bear left, towards the Meadows. “I hope that you enjoyed the lecture,” she said.

  Nick mumbled something that she did not hear, and moved off in the opposite direction. She watched him for a moment and felt, almost immediately, a strong sense of regret. Nick Smart was an unhappy man—that was apparent. He was, she imagined, lonely; living in a strange city where he had no past, no links, could not be easy. And she had allowed a visceral dislike to overcome her sense of what she should do, which was to forgive him his condescension, his egregious elegance, and at least say something kind to him, which she had not done. She stopped and turned round. He was walking up one side of George Square, along the edge of the gardens in the centre. He was looking at the ground, his head sunk.

  Isabel hesitated. It was wrong, she knew, quite wrong, to allow gratuitous bad feeling to exist between oneself and another. She should run after him; she should apologise; she should try to restore courteous relations between them. She stood still; by now Nick Smart was almost at the top of the square, and in a few moments he walked off to the right and disappeared. It would have been easy, but now it was too late—taking a few steps to apologise was one thing, running after somebody was another, or seemed to be another; it was as if by turning the corner he had walked out of the circle of her moral concern. She turned away and began to walk home. It was as good an illustration as any, she thought, of the proposition that we forget about those who are distant from us, whom we cannot see—the starving in some far-off land, the oppressed whose suffering is known only by vague report, the man who has walked round a corner. I have broken relations with him, she said to herself, and as she thought this she was reminded of a curious habit she had had as a young girl. If ever she said something uncharitable to another, she would ask herself, What if that person died right now? How would I feel?

  The childish trick worked in exactly the way it always did. She felt guilty; she regretted her lack of charity. Nick Smart was a stranger, far from home, and she had not comforted him.

  “But why should I?” she asked herself.

  “Because he is your moral neighbour,” a voice within her said. “Because you came into contact with him; that was all. But it was enough to make you behave towards him with decency, which you did not do because you are jealous and possessive.”

  The branches of the trees moved gently, nudged by a wind that Isabel barely felt.

  “Am I?” she asked the voice.

  “Oh yes,” it replied. “Very.”

  Conscience, she thought, walks with us; an unobtrusive companion, unseen, perhaps, but still audible.

  LATER, released from the postlecture reception, Edward Mendelson made his way up to Isabel’s house for dinner. Jamie was busy putting Charlie to bed when he arrived, and so Isabel entertained him herself in the ground-floor drawing room.

  “It’s just us,” she explained. “You said that you didn’t want me to have a large dinner party. So it’s just Jamie, you, and me.”

  “Exactly what I wanted,” he said. And then, “Jamie…I don’t believe that I’ve met him.”

  “You haven’t,” said Isabel. “When were you last in Edinburgh? Five years ago?”

  “About that. He’s…” The question went unfinished.

  “My boyfriend,” said Isabel. “Actually a bit more than that. We have a child together. A little boy.”

  Edward Mendelson inclined his head in congratulation. “I’m delighted.”

  Isabel poured them both a glass of wine, and for the next few minutes they discussed the lecture. Then Jamie appeared. He looked happy, thought Isabel; relaxed and happy. Charlie, it seemed, had that effect on him; and perhaps Charlie would grow up to be one of those people who made others happy just to be in his company. And would Charlie look like Jamie, she wondered, or be a male version of me? That one could not imagine, she decided; none of us could see ourselves as the opposite sex. Of course he might look like neither, as children often did; confounding recent genes in favour of ancient ones.

  The conversation flowed easily. Jamie asked about a production at the Met that he had read about in the papers; Edward Mendelson had seen it, and thought highly of it.

  “Auden had to live near a good opera house, didn’t he?” said Isabel.

  “Yes, which is why Kirchstetten suited him. It’s only forty miles or so from Vienna.”

  Isabel was silent. She knew that Edward Mendelson had been at the funeral in Kirchstetten; that he had been there when they played Siegfried’s Funeral March on a gramophone and then carried the poet from his house and the local brass band had struck up and accompanied the cortege through the streets of the village that had been so proud of the Herr Professor. She wanted to ask, What was it like? But she could not, because it was not a question that could be answered easily. Sad, of course. Tearful, surely. But in her mind there must have been a poignancy that transcended normal grief; as there must have been at that other Austrian funeral, in the rain, when Mozart was laid in his pauper’s grave; the death of poetry, the death of music, which leaves us nothing if those two things should die.

  They talked about the lecture.

  “Just where is the line between a rational sense of guilt,” Isabel asked, “and a neurotic one?”

  “In a difficult place, I expect,” said Edward Mendelson. “These lines are often fine.”

  “But you can tell when somebody’s crossed that line,” said Jamie.

  Isabel was interested. She was thinking of Marcus. There was no reason for him to feel guilty, if Stella’s view was correct, and yet he felt shame—that was obvious enough. So that was a case of shame following upon guilt which other people thought should be there, but which was not. You cannot feel guilty about a wrong which you simply did not do. She looked at Jamie. “Can you tell?”

  Jamie reached for the water jug. “Yes. I knew somebody at music college who felt perpetually guilty about the smallest things. He had been to one of those Catholic boarding schools and had been made to think about the implications for his soul of the very smallest things. His thoughts, for example. He felt guilty about his thoughts. All the time.”

  Isabel knew what Jamie meant. So am I neurotic? she wondered. She thought uncharitable thoughts—about Dove, for example. Should she feel guilty about that? At the height of his plot against her, she had imagined Dove being exposed as a plagiarist. Then she had imagined herself writing a critical review of one of his books and demolishing it, chapter by chapter, elegantly, like a matador with a pen. Surely we should not worry too much about our uncharitable thoughts, as long as we did not act on them. And yet that was not the understanding that people had had in the past: Did not the Book of Common Prayer say, “I have sinned in thought, word and deed”? Or had we released ourselves from the tyranny of worrying about the things that the mind came up with? Isabel felt uncertain; t
he niggling doubt remained that perhaps there was something in purity of mind after all.

  Edward Mendelson had an early plane to catch, back to London and then to New York, and so he did not stay for coffee after dinner. Isabel said good-bye to him at the front door, while Jamie remained in the kitchen to clean up. Edward said to her, “I’m so pleased to see you happy. I can tell that, you know—you’re very happy.”

  Isabel smiled. “There’s every reason for me to be happy,” she said. “I have a job I love, a nice man, a son. This house.” She paused. “Not that one should enumerate one’s good fortune in this life. Nemesis listens for that sort of thing, I fear.”

  “She has far greater fish to fry,” said Edward. “Terrible politicians. Dictators. Actors who have grown too big for their boots. Your claims are pretty modest by comparison. Hardly a trace of hubris, I would have thought.”

  He walked down the path. It was barely dark, as it was midsummer now, and even at ten in the evening the sky was suffused with an attenuated glow. The air was warm, almost balmy, and the leaves of the trees and shrubs, the rhododendrons, the azaleas, were heavy and static, as if weighed down by the air. I am very fortunate, thought Isabel, as she made her way back to the kitchen, where Jamie, who had stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, was standing in the middle of the room, stretching his arms up above him in an exaggerated yawn. The act made his shirt come up over his midriff, which was flat and muscled. To me the entirely beautiful, thought Isabel. He watched her, and let his arms fall. He has guessed what was in my mind, she thought.

  “I just saw Brother Fox outside the window,” he said. “Trotting along the top of the neighbours’ garden wall, bold as brass.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No. I don’t think so. He had places to go.”

  “ ‘For he had many a mile to go that night,’ ” said Isabel, looking out the window. “ ‘Before he reached the town-o.’ ”

  “I must learn the words of that song,” said Jamie. “We can sing it to Charlie.”