The Sunday Philosophy Club id-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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

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  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

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  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
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  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

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  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

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  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 a
way 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

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  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.

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  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.”