The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The central mystery, of course, was why we needed to be in love at all. The reductionist answer was that it was simply a matter of biology, and that love provided the motivational force that encouraged people to stay together to raise children. Like all the arguments of evolutionary psychology, it looked so simple and so obvious, but if that was all that we were, then why did we fall in love with ideas, and things, and places? Auden had captured this potential in pointing out that as a boy he had fallen in love with a pumping engine, and thought it “every bit as beautiful as you.” Displacement, the sociobiologists would say; and there was the old Freudian joke that tennis is a substitute for sex. To which there was only one reply: that sex could equally well become a substitute for tennis.

  “Very funny,” Cat had said when Isabel had once pointed this out to her. “But surely it’s absolutely right. Our emotions all seem geared towards keeping us in one piece, as animals, so to speak. Fear and flight. Fighting over food. Hatred and envy. All very physical and connected with survival.”

  “But might one not equally say that the emotions have a role in developing our higher capacities?” Isabel had countered. “Our emotions allow us to empathise with others. If I love another, then I know what it is to be that other person. If I feel pity—which is an important emotion, isn’t it?—then this helps me to understand the suffering of others. So our emotions make us grow morally. We develop a moral imagination.”

  “Perhaps,” Cat had said, but she had been looking away then, at a jar of pickled onions—this conversation had taken place in the delicatessen—and her attention had clearly wandered. Pickled onions had nothing to do with moral imagination, but were important in their own quiet, vinegary way, Isabel supposed.

  AFTER CAT AND TOBY had left, Isabel went outside, into the cool of the night. The large walled garden at the back of the house, hidden from the road, was in darkness. The sky was clear, and there were stars, normally not visible in the city, obscured by all the light thrown up by human habitation. She walked over the lawn towards the small wooden conservatory, under which she discovered a fox had recently made its burrow. She had named him Brother Fox, and had seen him from time to time—a svelte creature running sure-footed along the top of the wall or dashing across the road at night, on impenetrable business of its own. She had welcomed him, and had left a cooked chicken out one night, as an offering. By morning it had disappeared, although she later found a bone in a flower bed, well gnawed, the marrow extracted.

  What did she want for Cat? The answer was simple: she wanted happiness, which sounded trite, but was nevertheless true. In Cat’s case, that meant that she should find the right man, because men seemed to be so important to her. She did not resent Cat’s boyfriends—in principle, at least. Had she done so, the cause of her resentment would have been obvious: jealousy. But it was not that. She acknowledged what was important for her niece, and only hoped that she would find out what she was looking for, what she really wanted. In Isabel’s view that was Jamie. And what about myself? she thought. What do I want?

  I want John Liamor to walk through the door and say to me: I’m sorry. All these years that we’ve wasted. I’m sorry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NOTHING MORE ABOUT the incident appeared in what Isabel called the “lower papers” (well, they are, she would defend herself: look at their content); and what she referred to as the “morally serious papers,” The Scotsman and The Herald, were also silent on the subject. For all Isabel knew, McManus might have found out no more, or if he had pieced together a few more scraps of detail, his editor could have deemed it to be too inconsequential to print. There was a limit to what one could make of a simple tragedy, even if it had occurred in unusual circumstances. She assumed that there would be a Fatal Accident Inquiry, which was always held when a death occurred in sudden or unexpected circumstances, and this might be reported when it took place. These were public hearings, before the local judge, the sheriff, and in most cases the proceedings were quick and conclusive. Factory accidents in which somebody was found to have forgotten that a wire was live; a misconnected carbon monoxide extractor; a shotgun that was thought to be unloaded. It did not take too long to unravel the tragedy, and the sheriff would make his determination, as it was called, patiently listing what had gone wrong and what needed to be put right, warning sometimes, but for the most part not passing much comment. And then the court would move on to the next death, and the relatives of the last would make their way out onto the street in sad little knots of regret. The most likely conclusion in this case would be that an accident had occurred. Because it had taken place so publicly, there might be comments on safety, and the sheriff could suggest a higher rail in the gods. But it could be months before any of this happened, and by then, she hoped, she might have forgotten it.

  She might have discussed it again with Grace, but her housekeeper, it appeared, had other things on her mind. A friend was experiencing a crisis and Grace was lending moral support. It was a matter of masculine bad behaviour, she explained; her friend’s husband was going though a midlife crisis and his wife, Grace’s friend, was at her wit’s end.

  “He’s bought an entire new wardrobe,” Grace explained, casting her eyes upwards.

  “Perhaps he feels like a change of clothing,” ventured Isabel. “I’ve done that myself once or twice.”

  Grace shook her head. “He’s bought teenage clothes,” she said. “Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. That sort of thing. And he’s walking around listening to rock music. He goes to clubs.”

  “Oh,” said Isabel. Clubs sounded ominous. “What age is he?”

  “Forty-five. A very dangerous age for men, we’re told.”

  Isabel thought for a moment. What might one do in such a case?

  Grace supplied her answer. “I laughed at him,” she said. “I came straight out and said he looked ridiculous. I told him that he had no business wearing teenage boys’ clothing.”

  Isabel could picture it. “And?”

  “He told me to mind my own business,” Grace said indignantly. “He said that, just because I was past it, he was not. So I said, past what? And he didn’t reply.”

  “Trying,” said Isabel.

  “Poor Maggie,” Grace went on. “He goes off to these clubs and never takes her, not that she would want to go anyway. She sits at home and worries about what he’s getting up to. But there’s not much I can do. I did give him a book, though.”

  “And what was that?”

  “It was a dog-eared old book. I found it in a bookshop in the West Port. One Hundred Things for a Teenage Boy to Do. He didn’t think it funny.”

  Isabel burst out laughing. Grace was direct, which came, she imagined, from being brought up in a small flat off the Cowgate, a home in which there was no time for much except work, and where people spoke their minds. Isabel was conscious of how far Grace’s experience had been from her own; she had enjoyed all the privileges; she had had every chance educationally, while Grace had been obliged to make do with what was available at an indifferent and crowded school. It sometimes seemed to Isabel as if her education had brought her doubt and uncertainty, while Grace had been confirmed in the values of traditional Edinburgh. There was no room for doubt there; which had made Isabel wonder, Who is happier, those who are aware, and doubt, or those who are sure of what they believe in, and have never doubted or questioned it? The answer, she had concluded, was that this had nothing to do with happiness, which came upon you like the weather, determined by your personality.

  “My friend Maggie,” Grace announced, “thinks that you can’t be happy without a man. And this is what makes her so concerned about Bill and his teenage clothes. If he goes off with a younger woman, then there’ll be nothing left for her, nothing.”

  “You should tell her,” said Isabel. “You should tell her that you don’t need a man.”

  She made this remark without thinking how Grace might interpret it, and it suddenly occurred to her that Grace
might think that this was Isabel suggesting that Grace was a confirmed spinster, who had no chance of finding a man.

  “What I meant to say,” Isabel began, “was that one doesn’t need—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Grace interjected. “I know what you meant.”

  Isabel glanced at her quickly and then continued, “I’m not one to talk about men, anyway. I wasn’t conspicuously successful myself.”

  But why? she wondered. Why had she been unsuccessful? Wrong man, or wrong time, or both?

  Grace looked at her quizzically. “What happened to him, that man of yours? John what’s-his-name? That Irishman? You’ve never really told me.”

  “He was unfaithful,” said Isabel, simply. “All the time when we lived in Cambridge. And then, when we went to Cornell and I was on my fellowship there, he suddenly announced that he was going off to California with another woman, a girl really, and that was it. He just left in the space of one day.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes, just like that. America went to his head. He said that it freed him up. I’ve heard that normally cautious people can go quite mad there, just from feeling free of whatever it was that was holding them back at home. He was like that. He drank more, he had more girlfriends, and he was more impetuous.”

  Grace digested this. Then she asked, “He’s still there, I suppose?”

  Isabel shrugged. “I assume so. But I imagine that he’s with somebody else by now. I don’t know.”

  “But would you like to find out?”

  The answer was that of course she would. Because against all reason, against all personal conviction, she would forgive him if he came back and asked her for forgiveness, which he would never do, of course. And that made her safe from this weakness; the fact that never again would she be bewitched by John Liamor, never again would she be in that particular and profound danger.

  SHE WAS ON HER WAY to forgetting the Usher Hall incident two weeks later when she was invited to a party at a gallery to mark the opening of a show. Isabel bought paintings, and this meant that a steady stream of gallery invitations came into the house. For the most part she avoided the openings, which were cramped and noisy affairs, riddled with pretension, but when she knew that there would be strong interest in the paintings on display she might go to the opening—and arrive early, in order to see the work before rival red dots appeared underneath the labels. She had learned to do this after arriving late for the opening of a Cowie retrospective and finding that the few paintings that had been for sale had been bought within the first fifteen minutes. She liked Cowie, who had painted haunting pictures of people who seemed to be cocooned in old-fashioned stillness; quiet rooms in which sad-faced schoolgirls were occupied in drawing or in embroidery; Scottish country roads and paths that seemed to lead into nothing but further silence; folds of cloth in the artist’s studio. She had two small Cowie oils and would have been happy to purchase another, but she had been too late and she had learned her lesson.

  The show which opened that evening was of work by Elizabeth Blackadder. She had toyed with the idea of buying a large watercolour, but had decided to look at the other paintings before deciding. She did not find anything else that appealed, and when she returned, a red dot had appeared below the watercolour. A young man, somewhere in his late twenties and wearing a chalk-striped suit, was standing in front of it, glass in hand. She glanced at the painting, which seemed even more desirable now that it had been sold, and then she looked at him, trying not to show her annoyance.

  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” he said. “I always think of her as a Chinese painter. That delicacy. Those flowers.”

  “And cats too,” Isabel said, rather grumpily. “She paints cats.”

  “Yes,” said the young man. “Cats in gardens. Very comfortable. Not exactly social realism.”

  “Cats exist,” said Isabel. “For cats, her paintings must be social realism.” She looked at the painting again. “You’ve just bought it?” she asked.

  The young man nodded. “For my fiancée. As an engagement present.”

  It was said with pride—pride in the fact of the engagement rather than in the purchase—and Isabel immediately softened.

  “She’ll love it,” she said. “I was thinking of buying it myself, but I’m glad you’ve got it.”

  The young man’s expression turned to concern. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “They said that it was available. There was no indication …”

  Isabel brushed his comment aside. “Of course there wasn’t. It’s first come, first served. You beat me to it. Exhibitions are meant to be red in tooth and claw.”

  “There are others,” he said, gesturing to the wall behind them. “I’m sure that you’ll find something as good as this. Better, perhaps.”

  Isabel smiled. “Of course I will. And anyway, my walls are so full I would have had to take something down. I don’t need another painting.”

  He laughed at her comment. Then, noticing her empty glass, he offered to refill it for her, and she accepted. Returning, he introduced himself. He was Paul Hogg, and he lived one block away in Great King Street. He had seen her at one of the gallery shows, he was sure, but Edinburgh was a village, was it not, and one always saw people one had seen somewhere or other before. Did she not think that too?

  Isabel did. Of course, that had its drawbacks, did it not? What if one wanted to lead a secret life? Would it not be difficult in Edinburgh? Would one have to go over to Glasgow to lead it there?

  Paul thought not. He knew several people, it transpired, who led secret lives, and they seemed to do it successfully.

  “But how do you know about their secret lives?” asked Isabel. “Did they tell you themselves?”

  Paul thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “If they told me, then they would hardly be secret.”

  “So you found out?” said Isabel. “Rather proves my point.”

  He had to admit that it did, and they laughed. “Mind you,” he said, “I can’t imagine what I would do in a secret life, if I had one to lead. What is there to do that people really disapprove of these days? Nobody seems to blink an eyelid over affairs. And convicted murderers write books.”

  “Indeed they do,” said Isabel. “But are these books really any good? Do they really say anything to us? Only the very immature and the very stupid are impressed by the depraved.” She was silent for a moment. Then: “I suppose there must be something that people are ashamed of and are prepared to do in secret.”

  “Boys,” said Paul. “I know somebody who goes for boys. Nothing actually illegal. Seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds. But really just boys still.”

  Isabel looked at the painting, at the flowers and the cats. It was a long way from the world of Elizabeth Blackadder.

  “Boys,” she said. “I suppose some people find boys … how shall I put it? Interesting. One might want to be secretive about that. Not that Catullus was. He wrote poems about that sort of thing. He seemed not in the slightest bit embarrassed. Boys are a recognised genre in classical literature, aren’t they?”

  “This person I know goes off to Calton Hill, I think,” said Paul. “He drives up there in an empty car and drives down again with a boy. In secret, of course.”

  Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Oh well. People do these things.” There were things happening on one side of Edinburgh the other did not know a great deal about. Of course, Edinburgh, it was said, was built on hypocrisy. It was the city of Hume, of course, the home of the Scottish Enlightenment, but then what had happened? Petty Calvinism had flourished in the nineteenth century and the light had gone elsewhere; back to Paris, to Berlin, or off to America, to Harvard and the like, where everything was now possible. And Edinburgh had become synonymous with respectability, and with doing things in the way in which they had always been done. Respectability was such an effort, though, and there were bars and clubs where people might go and behave as they really wanted to behave, but did not dare do so publicly. The story
of Jekyll and Hyde was conceived in Edinburgh, of course, and made perfect sense there.

  “Mind you,” Paul went on, “I have no secret life myself. I’m terribly conventional. I’m actually a fund manager. Not very exciting. And my fiancée works in Charlotte Square. So we’re not really … how might one put it?”

  “Bohemian?” said Isabel, laughing.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We’re more …”

  “Elizabeth Blackadder? Flowers and cats?”

  They continued their conversation. After fifteen minutes or so, Paul put his glass down on a windowsill.

  “Why don’t we go to the Vincent Bar?” he said. “I have to meet Minty at nine, and I can’t be bothered to go back to the flat. We could have a drink and carry on talking. That’s if you’d like to. You may have other things to do.”

  Isabel was happy to accept. The gallery had filled up and was beginning to get hot. The level of conversation had risen, too, and people were shouting to be heard. If she stayed she would have a sore throat. She collected her coat, said good-bye to the gallery owners, and walked out with Paul to the small, unspoilt bar at the end of the road.

  The Vincent Bar was virtually empty and they chose a table near the front door, for the fresh air.

  “I hardly ever go to a pub,” said Paul. “And yet I enjoy places like this.”

  “I can’t remember when I was last in one,” said Isabel. “Maybe in an earlier life.” But of course she could remember those evenings, with John Liamor, and that was painful.

  “I was a fund manager in an earlier life, I suspect,” said Paul. “And presumably that’s what I’ll be in the next.”

  Isabel laughed. “Surely your job must have its moments,” she said. “Watching markets. Waiting for things to happen. Isn’t that what you do?”

  “Oh, I suppose it has its moments,” he said. “You have to read a lot. I sit at my desk and go through the financial press and company reports. I’m a sort of spy, really. I collect intelligence.”