The Sunday Philosophy Club id-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

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 the
n, 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

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  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