The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  At last Jamie had agreed. “If you insist,” he said. “If you really insist, I’m prepared to go with you. But it’s only because I don’t want you charging off into this by yourself. It’s not because I think it’s a good idea.”

  As Isabel saw Jamie out of the house later that evening, they had agreed that she would telephone him at some point in the next few days, to discuss how they were to proceed with Paul Hogg. At least she had an acquaintanceship with him, which would enable them to seek him out. But exactly how this would be done, and on what pretext, remained to be worked out.

  Barely had Jamie left the house than a thought occurred to Isabel. It almost sent her running after him to tell him about it, but she desisted. It was not all that late, and several neighbours walked their dogs along the street at that hour. She did not wish to be seen running after young men, in the street at least (though the metaphorical context would be as bad). That was not a situation in which anybody would wish to be seen, in much the same way as Dorothy Parker had pronounced that she would not wish to be caught, stuck at the hips, while climbing through anybody else’s window. She smiled at the thought. What was so funny about this? It was difficult to explain, but it just was. Perhaps it was the fact that somebody who would never climb through a window nonetheless expressed a view on the possibility of climbing through a window. But why was that amusing? Perhaps there was no explanation, just as there was no rationale for the intense humour of the remark she had once heard at a lecture given by Domenica Legge, a great authority on Anglo-Norman history. Professor Legge had said: “We must remember that the nobles of the time did not blow their noses in quite the way in which we blow our own noses: they had no handkerchiefs.” This had been greeted with peals of laughter, and she still found it painfully amusing. But there was really nothing funny about it at all. It was a serious business, no doubt, having no handkerchiefs; mundane, certainly, but serious nonetheless. (What did the nobles do, then? The answer was, apparently, straw. How awful. How scratchy. And if the nobles were reduced to using straw, then what did those beneath them in the social order use? The answer was, of course, vivid: they blew their nose on their fingers, as many people still did. She had seen it herself once or twice, though not in Edinburgh, of course.)

  It was not of handkerchiefs, or the lack of handkerchiefs, that she thought, but of Elizabeth Blackadder. Paul Hogg had bought the Blackadder which she had wanted. The exhibition at which he had bought it was a short one, and those who had bought paintings would by now have been allowed to remove them. This meant that anybody who wanted a further look at the painting would have to do so in Paul Hogg’s flat in Great King Street. She could be just such a person. She could telephone Paul Hogg and ask to see the painting again, as she was thinking of asking Elizabeth Blackadder, who still had her studio in the Grange, to paint a similar picture for her. This was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. An artist might not wish to make a mere copy of an existing work, but might be quite willing to do something similar.

  A lie, she thought, but only a lie at this stage of the plan’s conception; lies can become truths. She had indeed planned to buy a Blackadder and there was no reason why she should not commission one. In fact, she would do exactly that, which meant that she could see Paul Hogg on these grounds with a perfectly good conscience. Not even Sissela Bok, author of Lying, could object. Then, having examined the Blackadder again, which he would be proudly displaying on his wall, she would delicately raise the possibility that Mark Fraser might have found out something awkward in the course of his work at McDowell’s. Would Paul Hogg have any idea of what that might be? And if he did not, then she might be more specific and say to him that if he was attached to the young man—and he clearly had been fond of him, judging from his emotional reaction to what she had said in the Vincent Bar—then might he not be prepared to make some enquiries so as to prove or disprove the worrying hypothesis that all of this seemed to be pointing towards? It would have to be handled delicately, but it could be done. He might agree. And all the time, just to give her confidence, Jamie would be sitting beside her on Paul Hogg’s chintzy sofa. We think, she could say; we wonder. That sounded much more reasonable than the same thing expressed in the singular.

  She telephoned Jamie the next morning at the earliest decent hour; nine o’clock, in her view. Isabel observed an etiquette of the telephone: a call before eight in the morning was an emergency; between eight and nine it was an intrusion; thereafter calls could be made until ten in the evening, although anything after nine-thirty required an apology for the disturbance. After ten one was into emergency time again. On answering the telephone one should, if at all possible, give one’s name, but only after saying good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. None of these conventions, she conceded, was observed to any great extent by others, and not, she noted, by Jamie himself, who answered her call that morning with an abrupt “Yes.”

  “You don’t sound very welcoming,” said Isabel disapprovingly. “And how do I know who you are? ‘Yes’ is not enough. And if you had been too busy to take the call, would you simply have said ‘No’?”

  “Isabel?” he said.

  “Had you told me who you were, then I would have reciprocated the courtesy. Your last question would then have been otiose.”

  Jamie laughed. “How long is this going to take?” he asked. “I have to get a train to Glasgow at ten. We’re rehearsing for Parsifal.”

  “Poor you,” said Isabel. “Poor singers. What an endurance test.”

  “Yes,” Jamie agreed. “Wagner makes my head sore. But I really must get ready.”

  Isabel quickly explained her idea to him and then waited for his reaction.

  “If you insist,” Jamie said. “I suppose it sounds feasible enough. I’ll come along if you insist. Really insist.”

  He could have been more accommodating, thought Isabel after she had rung off, but at least he had agreed. Now she would have to telephone Paul Hogg at McDowell’s and ask him if and when it would be convenient to visit him. She was confident that he would welcome her suggestion. They had got on well together, and apart from the moment when she had inadvertently triggered in him a painful memory, the evening they had spent together had been a success. He had suggested, had he not, that she meet his fiancée, whose name she had forgotten but who could be referred to for the time being simply as “fiancée.”

  She telephoned at 10:45, a time when she believed there was the greatest chance that anybody who worked in an office would be having their morning coffee, and in fact he was, when she asked him.

  “Yes. I’m sitting here with the FT on my desk. I should be reading it, but I’m not. I’m looking out the window and drinking my coffee.”

  “But I’m sure that you’re about to take important decisions,” she said. “And one of them will be whether you would allow me to look at your Blackadder again. I want to ask her to do one for me, and I thought that it might be helpful to look at yours again.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Anybody can look at it. It’s still in the exhibition. It has another week to run.”

  Isabel was momentarily taken by surprise. Of course she should have telephoned the gallery to find out whether the show was still on, and if it was, she should have waited until he had collected his painting.

  “But it would be very nice to see you anyway,” Paul Hogg went on helpfully. “I have another Blackadder you might like to see.”

  They made the arrangement. Isabel would come the following evening, at six, for drinks. Paul Hogg was perfectly happy for her to bring somebody with her too, a young man who was very interested in art and whom she would like him to meet. Of course that would be perfectly convenient, and nice too.

  It was so easy, thought Isabel. It was so easy dealing with people who were well-mannered, as Paul Hogg was. They knew how to exchange those courtesies which made life go smoothly, which was what manners were all about. They were intended to avoid friction between people, and they did this by regulat
ing the contours of an encounter. If each party knew what the other should do, then conflict would be unlikely. And this worked at every level, from the most minor transaction between two people to dealings between nations. International law, after all, was simply a system of manners writ large.

  Jamie had good manners. Paul Hogg had good manners. Her mechanic, the proprietor of the small backstreet garage where she took her rarely used car for servicing, had perfect manners. Toby, by contrast, had bad manners; not on the surface, where he thought, quite wrongly, that it counted, but underneath, in his attitude to others. Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete moral seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs. Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this, and it always showed. They were impatient with those whom they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged. The person with good manners, however, would always listen to such people and treat them with respect.

  How utterly shortsighted we had been to listen to those who thought that manners were a bourgeois affectation, an irrelevance, which need no longer be valued. A moral disaster had ensued, because manners were the basic building block of civil society. They were the method of transmitting the message of moral consideration. In this way an entire generation had lost a vital piece of the moral jigsaw, and now we saw the results: a society in which nobody would help, nobody would feel for others; a society in which aggressive language and insensitivity were the norm.

  She stopped herself. This was a train of thought which, though clearly correct, made her feel old; as old as Cicero declaiming, O tempora! O mores! And this fact, in itself, demonstrated the subtle, corrosive power of relativism. The relativists had succeeded in so getting under our moral skins that their attitudes had become internalised, and Isabel Dalhousie, with all her interest in moral philosophy and distaste for the relativist position, actually felt embarrassed to be thinking such thoughts.

  She must stop this musing on moral imagination, she thought, and concentrate on things of more immediate importance, such as checking the morning’s mail for the review and finding out why that poor boy Mark Fraser fell to his death from the gods. But she knew she would never abandon these broader issues; it was her lot. She may as well accept it. She was tuned in to a different station from most people and the tuning dial was broken.

  She telephoned Jamie, forgetting that he would already have caught his train to Glasgow and would be, more or less at that moment, drawing into Queen Street Station. She waited for his answering machine to complete its speech, and then she left a message.

  Jamie, yes I’ve phoned him, Paul Hogg. He was happy for us to call to see him tomorrow at six. I’ll meet you half an hour before that, in the Vincent Bar. And Jamie, thanks for everything. I really appreciate your help on this. Thanks so much.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SHE WAS ANXIOUS in the pub, waiting for Jamie. It was a masculine place, at least at that hour, and she felt ill at ease. Women could go to pubs by themselves, of course, but she nonetheless felt out of place. The bartender, who served her a glass of bitter lemon with ice, smiled at her in a friendly way and commented on the fine evening. The clocks had just been put forward, and the sun was not setting now until after seven.

  Isabel agreed, but could think of nothing useful to add, so she said: “It’s spring, I suppose.”

  “I suppose,” said the barman. “But you never know.”

  Isabel had returned to her table. You never know. Of course you never know. Anything could happen in this life. Here she was, the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, about to go off in search of … of a murderer is what it amounted to. And in this task she was to be assisted, although somewhat reluctantly, by a beautiful young man with whom she was half in love but who was himself in love with her niece, who in turn appeared besotted with somebody else, who was having a simultaneous affair with his sister’s flatmate. No, the barman certainly did not know, and if she told him he would scarcely believe it.

  Jamie was ten minutes late. He had been practising, he said, and he had only looked at the clock just before five-thirty.

  “But you’re here,” said Isabel. “And that’s the important thing.” She glanced at her watch. “We have about twenty minutes. I thought I might just go over with you how I plan to approach this.”

  Jamie listened, eyeing her from time to time over the edge of his beer glass. He remained uneasy about the whole project, but he had to agree that she was well rehearsed. She would raise the issue gently, particularly bearing in mind the apparent rawness of Paul Hogg’s feelings on the matter. She would explain that she was not seeking to interfere, and the last thing that she was interested in was causing any embarrassment for McDowell’s. But they owed it to Mark, and to Neil, who had brought the matter to her attention, to at least take the issue a little bit further. She herself, of course, was convinced that there was nothing in it, but at least they could lay the matter to rest with a good conscience if they had investigated it fully.

  “Good script,” Jamie commented after she had finished. “Covers it all.”

  “I can’t see that he would be offended by any of that,” said Isabel.

  “No,” said Jamie. “That’s unless it’s him.”

  “What’s him?”

  “Unless he did it himself. He might be the insider trader.”

  Isabel stared at her companion. “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, why not? He’s the person that Mark must have been working with most closely. He was the head of his section or whatever. If Mark knew anything, it must have been about the stuff that he was working on.”

  Isabel considered this. It was possible, she supposed, but she thought it unlikely. There had been no doubting the genuineness of the emotion he had shown on the occasion of their first meeting, when Mark’s name had come up. He was devastated by what had happened; that was perfectly obvious. And if that were so, then he could not have been the person who arranged to dispose of Mark, which meant that he could not be the person fearing exposure.

  “Do you see that?” she said to Jamie.

  Jamie did, but he thought it wise to keep an open mind.

  “We could be mistaken,” he said. “Murderers feel guilt. They mourn their victims sometimes. Paul Hogg may be like that.”

  “He’s not,” said Isabel. “You haven’t met him yet. He’s not like that. It’s somebody else we’re looking for.”

  Jamie shrugged. “It might be. It might not. At least keep an open mind.”

  PAUL HOGG LIVED on the first floor of a Georgian town house in Great King Street. It was one of the most handsome streets in the New Town, and from his side, the south side, there was a view, from the top floors at least, of the Firth of Forth, a blue strip of sea just beyond Leith, and, beyond that, of the hills of Fife. The first floor had other reasons to commend it, though, even if the view was only of the other side of the street. In some streets at least, these flats were called the drawing-room flats, as they had been the main drawing rooms of the old, full houses. Their walls, therefore, were higher and their windows went from ceiling to floor, great expanses of glass which flooded the rooms with light.

  They walked up the common stairway, a generous sweep of stone stairs, about which there lingered a slight smell of cat, and found the door with HOGG on a square brass plate. Isabel glanced at Jamie, who winked at her. His scepticism had been replaced by a growing interest in what they were doing, and it was she, now, who felt doubtful.

  Paul Hogg answered the door quickly and took their coats. Isabel introduced Jamie, and the two shook hands.

  “I’ve seen you somewhere,” said Paul Hogg. “I don’t know where.”

  “Edinburgh,” said Jamie, and they laughed.

  He led them through to the drawing room, which was a large, elegantly furnished room, dominated by an impressive white mantelpiece. Isabel noticed the invitations—at least four of them—propped up on the man
telpiece, and when Paul Hogg went out of the room to fetch their drinks, and they had not yet sat down, she sidled over and read them quickly.

  Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Holmes, At Home, Thursday 16th (Isabel had been invited too). Then, George Maxtone requests the pleasure of the company of Ms. Minty Auchterlonie at a Reception at the Lothian Gallery, at 6 p.m., Tuesday, 18th May; and Minty: Peter and Jeremy, Drinks in the Garden (weather permitting, probably not), Friday, 21st May, 6:30 p.m. And finally, Paul and Minty: Please come to our wedding reception at Prestonfield House on Saturday, 15th May. Ceilidh, 8 p.m. Angus and Tatti. Dress: Evening/ Highland.

  Isabel smiled, although Jamie was looking at her disapprovingly, as if she were reading something private. Jamie came over to join her and squinted briefly at the invitations. “You shouldn’t read other people’s things,” he whispered. “It’s rude.”

  “Pah!” hissed Isabel. “That’s why these things are up here. To be read. I’ve seen invitations on mantelpieces three years out of date. Invitations to the garden party at Holyroodhouse, for instance. Years old, but still displayed.”

  She led him away from the mantelpiece to stand before a large watercolour of poppies in a garden. “That’s her,” she said. “Elizabeth Blackadder. Poppies. Garden walls with cats on them. But terribly well done in spite of the subject matter.” And she thought: I have no pictures of poppies in my house; I have never been stuck at the hips going through somebody else’s window.

  This was where Paul Hogg, returning with two glasses in his hands, found them.

  “There you are,” he said cheerfully. “What you came to see.”

  “It’s a very good one,” said Isabel. “Poppies again. So important.”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “I like poppies. It’s such a pity that they fall to bits when you pick them.”

  “A clever defence mechanism,” said Isabel, glancing at Jamie. “Roses should catch on to that. Thorns are obviously not enough. Perfect beauty should be left exactly as it is.”