The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Them?” asked Isabel. “Was he married or …” She paused. People often did not bother to marry, she had to remind herself, and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases. But how did you put that particular question? Did he have a partner? But partners could be anyone, from the most temporary or recent to the wife or husband of fifty years. Perhaps one should just say: Was there somebody else? Which was sufficiently vague to cover everything.

  Cat shook her head. “I don’t think so. There were two flatmates. Three of them shared. A girl and another boy. The girl’s from the west, Glasgow or somewhere, and she’s the one who comes in here. The other one I’m not sure about. Neil, I think, but I may be mixing him up.”

  Cat’s assistant, a silent young man called Eddie, who always avoided eye contact, now brought them each a cup of hot milky coffee. Isabel thanked him and smiled, but he looked away and retreated to the back of the counter.

  “What’s wrong with Eddie?” whispered Isabel. “He never looks at me. I’m not all that frightening, am I?”

  Cat smiled. “He’s a hard worker,” she replied. “And he’s honest.”

  “But he never looks at anyone.”

  “There may be a reason for that,” said Cat. “I came across him the other evening, sitting in the back room, his feet on the desk. He had his head in his hands and I didn’t realise it at first, but he was in tears.”

  “Why?” asked Isabel. “Did he tell you?”

  Cat hesitated for a moment. “He told me something. Not very much.”

  Isabel waited, but it was clear that Cat did not want to divulge what Eddie had said to her. She steered the subject back to the event of the previous night. How could he have fallen from the gods when there was that brass rail, was there not, which was intended to stop exactly that? Was it a suicide? Would somebody really jump from there? It would be a selfish way of going, surely, as there could easily be somebody down below who could be injured, or even killed.

  “It wasn’t suicide,” Isabel said firmly. “Definitely not.”

  “How do you know?” asked Cat. “You said you didn’t see him actually go over the edge. How can you be so sure?”

  “He came down upside down,” said Isabel, remembering the sight of the jacket and shirt pulled down by gravity and the exposed flat midriff. He was like a boy diving off a cliff, into a sea that was not there.

  “So? People turn around, presumably, when they fall. Surely that means nothing.”

  Isabel shook her head. “He would not have had time to do that. You must remember that he was just above us. And people don’t dive when they commit suicide. They fall feetfirst.”

  Cat thought for a moment. That was probably right. Occasionally the newspaper printed pictures of people on the way down from buildings and bridges, and they tended to be falling feetfirst. But it still seemed so unlikely that anybody could fall over that parapet by mistake, unless it was lower than she remembered it. She would take a look next time she was in the Usher Hall.

  They sipped at their coffee. Cat broke the silence. “You must feel awful. I remember when I saw an accident in George Street, I felt just awful myself. Just witnessing something like that is so traumatic.”

  “I didn’t come here to sit and moan, you know,” said Isabel. “I didn’t want to sit here and make you feel miserable too. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to say sorry,” said Cat, taking Isabel’s hand. “You just sit here as long as you like and then we can go out for lunch a bit later on. I could take the afternoon off and do something with you. How about that?”

  Isabel appreciated the offer, but she wanted to sleep that afternoon. And she should not sit at the table too long either, as it was meant for the use of customers.

  “Perhaps you could come and have dinner with me tonight,” she said. “I’ll rustle up something.”

  Cat opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated. Isabel saw this. She would be going out with one of the boyfriends.

  “I’d love to,” said Cat at last. “The only problem is that I was going to be meeting Toby. We were going to meet at the pub.”

  “Of course,” said Isabel, quickly. “Some other time.”

  “Unless Toby could come too?” Cat added. “I’m sure he’d be happy to do that. Why don’t I make a starter and bring it along?”

  Isabel was about to refuse, as she imagined that the young couple might not really want to have dinner with her, but Cat now insisted, and they agreed that she and Toby would come to the house shortly after eight. As Isabel left and began to walk back to the house, she thought about Toby. He had arrived in Cat’s life a few months before, and like the one before him, Andrew, she had her misgivings about him. It was difficult to put one’s finger exactly on why it was that she had these reservations, but she was convinced that she was right.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THAT AFTERNOON SHE SLEPT. When she awoke, shortly before five, she felt considerably better. Grace had gone, but had left a note on the kitchen table. Somebody phoned. He would not say who he was. I told him you were asleep. He said that he would phone again. I did not like the sound of him. She was used to notes like that from Grace: messages would be conveyed with a gloss on the character of those involved. That plumber I never trusted called and said that he would come tomorrow. He would not give a time. Or: While you were out, that woman returned that book she borrowed. At last.

  She was usually bemused by Grace’s comments, but over the years she had come to see that Grace’s insights were useful. Grace was rarely wrong about character, and her judgements were devastating. They were often of the one-word variety: cheat, she would say about somebody, or crook, or drunkard. If her views were positive, they might be slightly longer—most generous, or really kind—but these plaudits were hard to earn. Isabel had pressed her once as to the basis of her assessments of people, and Grace had become tight-lipped.

  “I can just tell,” she would say. “People are very easy to read. That’s all there is to it.”

  “But there’s often much more to them than you think,” Isabel had argued. “Their qualities only come out when you get to know them a bit better.”

  Grace had shrugged. “There are some people I don’t want to get to know better.”

  The discussion had ended there. Isabel knew that she would be unable to change the other woman’s mind. Grace’s world was very clear: there was Edinburgh, and the values which Edinburgh endorsed; and then there was the rest. It went without saying that Edinburgh was right, and that the best that could be hoped for was that those who looked at things differently would eventually come round to the right way of thinking. When Grace had first been employed—shortly after the onset of Isabel’s father’s illness—Isabel had been astonished to find that there was somebody who was still so firmly planted in a world that she had thought had largely disappeared: the world of douce Edinburgh, erected on rigid hierarchies and the deep convictions of Scottish Presbyterianism. Grace had proved her wrong.

  It was the world which Isabel’s father had come from, but from which he had wanted to free himself. He had been a lawyer, from a line of lawyers. He could have remained within the narrow world of his own father and grandfather, a world bounded by trust deeds and documents of title, but as a student he had been introduced to international law and a world of broader possibilities. He had enrolled for a master’s degree in the law of treaties; Harvard, where he went for this, might have offered him an escape, but in the event did not. Moral suasion was brought to bear on him to return to Scotland. He almost stayed in America, but decided at the last moment to return, accompanied by his new wife, whom he had met and married in Boston. Once in Edinburgh, he was sucked back into the family’s legal practise, where he was never happy. In an unguarded moment he had remarked to his daughter that he regarded his entire working life as a sentence which he had been obliged to serve out, a conclusion that had privately appalled Isabel. It was for this reason that when her time came to go to university, she had put
to one side all thoughts of a career and chosen the subject which really interested her, philosophy.

  There had been two children: Isabel, the elder of the two, and a brother. Isabel had gone to school in Edinburgh, but her brother had been sent off to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. Their parents had chosen for him a school noted for intellectual achievement, and unhappiness. What could one expect? The placing of five hundred boys together, cut off from the world, was an invitation to create a community in which every cruelty and vice could flourish, and did. He had become unhappy and rigid in his views, out of self-defence—the character armour which Wilhelm Reich spoke about, Isabel thought, and which led to these stiff, unhappy men who talked so guardedly in their clipped voices. After university, which he left without getting a degree, he took a job in a City of London merchant bank, and led a quiet and correct life doing whatever it was that merchant bankers did. He and Isabel had never been close, and as an adult he contacted Isabel only occasionally. He was almost a stranger to her, she thought; a friendly, if rather detached, stranger whose only real passion that she could detect was a consuming interest in the collecting of colourful old share certificates and bonds: South American railway stock, czarist long-term bonds—a whole colourful world of capitalism. But she had once asked him what lay behind these ornately printed certificates of ownership. Fourteen-hour workdays on plantations? Men working for a pittance until they were too weakened by silicosis, or too poisoned by toxins, to work anymore? (Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?)

  SHE WENT INTO THE LARDER and retrieved the ingredients for a risotto she would make for Cat and Toby. The recipe called for porcini mushrooms, and she had a supply of these, tied up in a muslin bag. Isabel took a handful of the dried fungus, savouring the unusual odour, sharp and salty, so difficult to classify. Yeast extract? She would soak them for half an hour and then use the darkened liquid they produced to cook the rice. She knew that Cat liked risotto and that this was one of her favourites, and Toby, she imagined, would eat anything. He had been brought to dinner once before, and it was at this meal that her doubts about him had set in. She would have to be careful, though, or she would end up making Grace-like judgements. Unfaithful. She had already done it.

  She returned to the kitchen and switched on the radio. It was the end of a news programme, and the world, as usual, was in disarray. Wars and rumours of war. A politician, a minister in the government, was being pressed for a response and refusing to answer. There was no crisis, he said. Things had to be kept in perspective.

  But there is a crisis, insisted the interviewer; there just is.

  That is a matter of opinion; I don’t believe in alarming people unduly.

  It was in the middle of the politician’s embarrassment that the doorbell sounded. Isabel put the mushrooms into a bowl and went through to the hall to open the door. Grace had suggested that she install a spy hole in order to identify callers before she opened the door, but she had never done so. If anybody rang very late, she could peer at them through the letter box, but for the most part she would open the door on trust. If we all lived behind barriers, then we would be dreadfully isolated.

  The man on the doorstep had his back to her and was looking out over the front garden. When the door opened he turned round, almost guiltily, and smiled at her.

  “You’re Isabel Dalhousie?”

  She nodded. “I am.” Her glance ran over him. He was in his mid-thirties, with dark, slightly bushy hair, smartly enough dressed in a dark blazer and charcoal slacks. He had small, round glasses and a dark red tie. There was a pen and an electronic diary of some sort in the top pocket of his shirt. She imagined Grace’s voice: Shifty.

  “I’m a journalist,” he said, showing her a card with the name of his newspaper. “My name is Geoffrey McManus.”

  Isabel nodded politely. She would never read his paper.

  “I wondered if I could have a word with you,” he said. “I gather you witnessed that unfortunate accident in the Usher Hall last night. Could you talk to me about it?”

  Isabel hesitated for a moment, but then she stepped back into the hall and invited him in. McManus moved forward quickly, as if he was concerned that she might suddenly change her mind. “Such an unpleasant business,” he said, as he followed her into the living room at the front of the house. “It was a terrible thing to happen.”

  Isabel gestured for him to sit down and she placed herself on the sofa near the fireplace. She noticed that as he sat down he cast an eye around the walls, as if assessing the value of the paintings. Isabel squirmed. She did not like to vaunt her wealth, and felt uncomfortable when it came under scrutiny. Perhaps he did not know, though. The painting by the door, for example, was a Peploe, and an early one. And the small oil beside the fireplace was a Stanley Spencer—a sketch for a part of When We Dead Awaken.

  “Nice paintings,” he said jauntily. “You like art?”

  She looked at him. His tone was familiar. “I do like art. Yes. I like art.”

  He looked around the room again. “I interviewed Robin Philipson once,” he said. “I went to his studio.”

  “You must have found that very interesting.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “I don’t like the smell of paint, I’m afraid. It gives me a headache.”

  McManus was fiddling with a mechanical pencil, releasing the lead and then pushing it back in again. “May I ask you what you do? That is, if you work.”

  “I edit a journal,” said Isabel. “A philosophical journal. The Review of Applied Ethics.”

  McManus raised an eyebrow. “We’re both in the same trade, then,” he said.

  Isabel smiled. She was about to say “hardly” but did not. And in a sense he was right. Her job was a part-time one, involving the assessment and editing of scholarly papers, but ultimately it was, as he suggested, about getting words onto paper.

  She returned to the subject of the incident. “What happened in the Usher Hall,” she said. “Is there anything more known about it?”

  McManus took a notebook out of the pocket of his jacket and flipped it open. “Nothing much,” he said. “We know who the young man was and what he did. I’ve spoken to his flatmates and I’m trying to get in touch with the parents. I’ll probably be able to see them this evening. They’re up in Perth.”

  Isabel stared at him. He was proposing to speak to them this evening, in the middle of their grief. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you have to speak to those poor people?”

  McManus fingered the spiral binder of his notebook. “I’m writing a story about it,” he said. “I need to cover every angle. Even the parents.”

  “But they’ll be terribly upset,” said Isabel. “What do you expect them to say? That they’re sorry about it?”

  McManus looked at her sharply. “The public has a legitimate interest in these things,” he said. “I can see you don’t approve, but the public has a right to be informed. Do you have any problem with that?”

  Isabel wanted to say that she did, but she decided not to engage with her visitor. Anything she said about intrusive journalism would make no difference to the way in which he saw his job. If he had moral qualms about speaking to the recently bereaved, she was sure that these would be kept very much in the background.

  “What do you want to know from me, Mr. McManus?” she asked, glancing at her watch. He would be offered no coffee, she had decided.

  “Right,” he said. “I would like to know what you saw, please. Just tell me everything.”

  “I saw very little,” said Isabel. “I saw him fall, and then, later on, I saw him being carried out on the stretcher. That’s all I saw.”

  McManus nodded. “Yes, yes. But tell me about it. What did he look like going down? Did you see his face?”

  Isabel looked down at her hands, which were folded on her lap. She had seen his face, and she had thought that he must have seen her.
His eyes had been wide, with what was either surprise or terror. She had seen his eyes.

  “Why would you want to know if I saw his face?” she asked.

  “That might tell us something. You know. Something about what he was feeling. About what happened.”

  She stared at him for a moment, struggling with her distaste for his insensitivity. “I didn’t see his face. I’m sorry.”

  “But you saw his head? Was he turned away from you, or facing you?”

  Isabel sighed. “Mr. McManus, it all happened very quickly, in a second or so. I don’t think I saw very much. Just a body falling from above, and then it was all over.”

  “But you must have noticed something about him,” McManus insisted. “You must have seen something. Bodies are made up of faces and arms and legs and all the rest. We see individual bits as well as the whole.”

  Isabel wondered whether she could ask him to leave, and decided that she would do so in a moment. But his line of questioning suddenly changed.

  “What happened afterwards?” he asked. “What did you do?”

  “I went downstairs,” she said. “There was a group of people in the foyer. Everybody was pretty shocked.”

  “And then you saw him being carried out?”

  “I did.”

  “And that’s when you saw his face?”

  “I suppose so. I saw him going out on the stretcher.”

  “Then what did you do? Did you do anything else?”

  “I went home,” said Isabel sharply. “I gave my statement to the police and then I went home.”

  McManus fiddled with his pencil. “And that was all you did?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel.

  McManus wrote something down in his notebook. “What did he look like on the stretcher?”

  Isabel felt her heart thumping within her. There was no need for her to put up with any more of this. He was a guest—of sorts—in her house and if she no longer wished to discuss the matter with him, then she had only to ask him to leave. She took a deep breath. “Mr. McManus,” she began, “I really do not think that there’s much point in going into these matters. I cannot see what bearing it has on any report which you will publish of the incident. A young man fell to his death. Surely that is enough. Do your readers need to know anything more about how he looked on the way down? What do they expect? That he was laughing as he fell? That he looked cheerful on the stretcher? And his parents—what do they expect of them? That they are devastated? Really, how remarkable!”