The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “This Lady Macbeth syndrome?” asked Jamie.

  “Maybe that too,” said Isabel, “if it exists. I was thinking of something much more common. Psychopathy, or sociopathy—call it what you will. She’s sociopathic. She will have no moral compunction in doing whatever is in her interests. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Including pushing people over the gods at the Usher Hall?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Absolutely.”

  Jamie thought for a moment. Isabel’s explanation seemed plausible, and he was prepared to go along with it, but did she have any idea of what they might do next? What she had suggested was surmise, no more. Presumably there would need to be some form of proof if anything more were to be done. And they had no proof, none at all; all that they had was a theory as to motive. “So,” he said. “What now?”

  Isabel smiled. “I have no idea.”

  Jamie could not conceal his irritation at her insouciance. “I don’t see how we can leave it at that. We’ve gone so far. We can’t just leave the matter there.”

  The tone of Isabel’s response was placatory. “I wasn’t suggesting that we leave anything anywhere. And it doesn’t matter that I have no idea what to do, right at the moment. A period of doing nothing is exactly what’s needed.”

  Seeing Jamie taken aback by this, Isabel went on to explain. “I think she knows,” she said. “I think that she knows why we were there.”

  “She said something?”

  “Yes. When I was talking to her—you were chatting to Paul Hogg at the time—she said to me that she had heard from her fiancé that I was interested in—those were her exact words, ‘interested in’—Mark Fraser. She waited for me to say something, but I just nodded. She came back to the subject a little later and asked me whether I had known him well. Again I dodged her question. It made her uneasy, I could see it. And I’m not surprised.”

  “So do you think she knows that we suspect her?”

  Isabel took a sip of wine. From the kitchen came wafting a smell of garlic and olive oil. “Smell that,” she said. “Delicious. Does she think we know? Maybe. But whatever she may think, I’m pretty sure that we are going to hear from her at some stage. She will want to know more about what we’re up to. She’ll come to us. Let’s just give her a few days to do that.”

  Jamie looked unconvinced. “These sociopaths,” he said. “What do they feel like? Inside?”

  Isabel smiled. “Unmoved,” she said. “They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved. Cats are sociopaths, you see. It’s their natural state.”

  “And is it their fault? Are they to blame?”

  “Cats are not to blame for being cats,” said Isabel, “and therefore they cannot be blamed for doing the things that cats do, such as eating garden birds or playing with their prey. Cats can’t help any of that.”

  “And what about people like that? Can they help it?” asked Jamie.

  “It’s very problematic whether they are to be blamed for their actions,” said Isabel. “There’s an interesting literature on it. They might argue that their acts are the result of their psychopathology. They act the way they do because of their personality being what it is, but then they never chose to have a personality disorder. So how can they be responsible for that which they did not choose?”

  Jamie looked towards the kitchen. He saw a chef dip a finger into a bowl and then lick it thoughtfully. A sociopathic chef would be a nightmare. “It’s the sort of thing that you might discuss with your friends,” he said. “The Sunday Philosophy Club. You could discuss the moral responsibility of people like that.”

  Isabel smiled ruefully. “If I could get the club together,” she said. “Yes, if I could get the club to meet.”

  “Sunday’s not an easy day,” said Jamie.

  “No,” Isabel agreed. “That’s what Cat says too.” She paused. She did not like to mention Cat too much in Jamie’s presence because he always looked wistful, almost lost, when she did so.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WHAT I NEED, thought Isabel, is a few days free of intrigue. I need to get back to editing the review, to doing the crosswords without interruption, to going for the occasional walk into Bruntsfield to have an inconsequential chat with Cat. I do not need to spend my time conspiring with Jamie in pubs and restaurants and brushing up against scheming corporate financiers with expensive tastes in art.

  She had not slept well the previous night. She had said goodbye to Jamie after their meal at the restaurant and had not arrived back at the house until well after eleven. Once in bed, with the light switched out, and the moonlight throwing into her room the shadow of the tree outside her window, she had lain awake, thinking of the impasse which she feared they had reached. Even if the next move was down to Minty Auchterlonie, there were difficult decisions to be made. And then there was the whole business of Cat and Toby. She wished that it had never occurred to her to follow him, as the knowledge that she had acquired weighed heavily upon her conscience. She had decided that for the time being she would do nothing about it, but she knew that this was only shelving a problem which she would have to confront at some time or other. She was not sure how she would be able to deal with Toby when next she saw him. Would she be able to maintain her normal attitude, which, even if not friendly at heart, was at least as polite as circumstances demanded?

  She slept, but only fitfully, with the result that she was still sound asleep when Grace arrived the next morning. If she was not downstairs, Grace inevitably came up to check on her, bearing a reviving cup of tea. She woke up to Grace’s knock.

  “A bad night?” Grace asked solicitously as she placed the cup of tea on Isabel’s bedside table.

  Isabel sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t think I went to sleep until two,” she said.

  “Worries?” asked Grace, looking down at her.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Worries and doubts. This and that.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Grace. “It happens to me too. I start worrying about the world. I wonder where it’s all going to end.”

  “Not with a bang but a whimper,” said Isabel vaguely. “That’s what T. S. Eliot said, and everybody always quotes him on it. But it’s really a very silly thing to say, and I’m sure that he regretted it.”

  “Silly man,” said Grace. “Your friend Mr. Auden would never have said that, would he?”

  “Certainly not,” said Isabel, twisting round in bed to reach for the teacup. “Although he did say some silly things when he was young.” She took a sip of tea, which always seemed to have an immediate effect on her clarity of mind. “And then he said some silly things when he was old. In between, though, he was usually very acute.”

  “Cute?”

  “Acute.” Isabel started to get out of bed, feeling with her toes for the slippers on the bedside rug. “If he wrote something which was wrong, which was meretricious, he would go back to it and change it, if he could. Some of his poems he denounced altogether. ‘September 1st, 1939’ was an example.”

  She drew the curtains. It was a bright spring day, with the first signs of heat in the sun. “He said that poem was dishonest, although I think it’s got some wonderful lines. Then, in Letters from Iceland, he wrote something which had absolutely no meaning, but which sounded magnificent. And the ports have names for the sea. It’s a marvellous line, isn’t it? But it doesn’t mean anything, does it, Grace?”

  “No,” said Grace. “I don’t see how ports can have names for the sea. I don’t see it.”

  Isabel rubbed her eyes again. “Grace, I want to have a simple day. Do you think that you can help me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Could you answer the phone? Tell anybody that I’m working, which I intend to be. Tell them that I’ll be able to phone them back tomorrow.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Except Cat. And Jamie. I’ll speak to them, although I hope that they don’t phone today. Everybody else will have to w
ait.”

  Grace approved. She liked to be in control of the house, and being asked to turn people away was a most welcome instruction.

  “It’s about time you did this,” she said. “You’re at everybody’s beck and call. It’s ridiculous. You deserve a bit of time to yourself.”

  Isabel smiled. Grace was her greatest ally. Whatever disagreements they might have, in the final analysis she knew that Grace had her interests firmly at heart. This was loyalty of a sort which was rare in an age of self-indulgence. It was an old-fashioned virtue of the type which her philosophical colleagues extolled but could never themselves match. And Grace, in spite of her tendency to disapprove of certain people, had many other virtues. She believed in a God who would ultimately do justice to those to whom injustice had been done; she believed in work, and the importance of never being late or missing a day through “so-called illness,” and she believed in never ignoring a request for help from anybody, no matter their condition, no matter the fault that lay behind their plight. This was true generosity of spirit, concealed behind a sometimes slightly brusque exterior.

  “You’re wonderful, Grace,” Isabel said. “Where would any of us be without you?”

  SHE WORKED THE ENTIRE morning. The post had brought a further bundle of submissions for the review and she entered the details of each of these in the book which she kept for the purpose. She suspected that several would not survive the first stage of screening; although one of these, “Gambling: An Ethical Analysis,” revealed, at first glance, some possibilities. What ethical problems did gambling occasion? Isabel thought that there was a straightforward utilitarian argument to this, at the very least. If you had six children, as gamblers so often seemed to do (another sort of gambling? she wondered) then one had a duty to steward one’s resources well, for the children’s sakes. But if one was well-off, with no dependents, then was there anything intrinsically wrong in placing, if not one’s last sou, then one’s surplus sous, on a bet? Isabel thought for a moment. Kantians would be in no doubt about the answer to that, but that was the problem with Kantian morality: it was so utterly predictable, and left no room for subtlety; rather like Kant himself, she thought. In a purely philosophical sense, it must be very demanding to be German. Far better to be French (irresponsible and playful) or Greek (grave, but with a light touch). Of course, her own heritage, she thought, was enviable: Scottish commonsense philosophy on one side and American pragmatism on the other. That was a perfect combination. There had, of course, been those years at Cambridge, and that meant Wittgensteinism and a dose of linguistic philosophy, but that never did anybody any harm, as long as one remembered to reject it as one matured. And, I may as well admit it, I am mature, she thought, as she looked out the window of her study, into the garden, with its luxuriant shrubs and the first blossoms of white coming out on the magnolia.

  She selected one of the more promising articles to read that morning. If it was worthwhile, she could then send it out for peer review that afternoon, and that would give her the sense of accomplishment that she needed. The title had caught her attention, largely because of the topicality of genetics—which formed the background to the problem—and because of the problem itself, which was, once again, truth telling. She was surrounded, she felt, by issues of truth telling. There had been that article on truth telling in sexual relationships, which had so entertained her and which had already been commented upon favourably by one of the journal’s referees. Then there had been the Toby problem, which had brought the dilemma into the very centre of her own moral life. The world, it seemed, was based on lies and half-truths of one sort or another, and one of the tasks of morality was to help us negotiate our way round these. Yes, there were so many lies: and yet the sheer power of truth was in no sense dimmed. Had Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn not said, in his Nobel address, “One word of truth will conquer the whole world.” Was this wishful thinking on the part of one who had lived in an entanglement of Orwellian state-sponsored lies, or was it a justifiable faith in the ability of truth to shine through the darkness? It had to be the latter; if it was the former, then life would be too bleak to continue. In that respect, Camus was right: the ultimate philosophical question was suicide. If there was no truth, then there would be no meaning, and our life was Sisyphean. And if life were Sisyphean, then what point in continuing with it? She reflected for a moment on the list of bleak adjectives. Orwellian, Sisyphean, Kafkaesque. Were there others? It was a great honour to a philosopher, or a writer, to become an adjective. She had seen “Hemingwayesque,” which might be applied to a life of fishing and bullfighting, but there was no adjective, so far, for the world of failure and rundown loci chosen by Graham Greene as the setting for his moral dramas. “Greene-like”? she wondered. Far too ugly. “Greeneish,” perhaps. Of course, “Greeneland” existed.

  And here was truth telling again, this time in a paper from a philosopher in the National University of Singapore, a Dr. Chao. “Doubts About Father” was the title, and the subtitle was “Paternalism and Truthfulness in Genetics.” Isabel moved from her desk to the chair near the window—the chair in which she liked to read her papers. As she did so, the telephone in the hall rang. After three rings it was answered. She waited; no call came from Grace. So she turned her attention to “Doubts About Father.”

  The paper, which was clearly written, began with a story. Clinical geneticists, Dr. Chao said, were often confronted with misattributed paternity, and these cases posed difficult issues of how, if at all, these mistakes should be revealed. Here is a case, he wrote, which involved just such an issue.

  Mr. and Mrs. B. had given birth to a child with a genetic illness. Although the child could be expected to live, the condition was sufficiently serious to raise the issue of whether Mrs. B. should be tested during future pregnancies. Some fetuses would be affected, while others would not be. The only way to tell was prenatal screening.

  So far, so good, thought Isabel. Of course, there were broader issues about screening, including major ones of eugenics, but Dr. Chao did not seem concerned with those, which was quite right: this was about truth telling and paternalism. Dr. Chao continued: Mr. and Mrs. B. had to have a genetic test to confirm their carrier status. In order for this particular condition to manifest itself, both parents of the affected child would have to be carriers of the relevant gene. When the doctor received the test results, however, these showed that while Mrs. B. was a carrier, Mr. B. was not. The child who had been born with the condition, then, must have been by another man. Mrs. B. (Mrs. Bovary perhaps, thought Isabel), who was not described, had a lover.

  One solution was to tell Mrs. B. in private and then to leave it up to her to decide whether she would confess to her husband. At first blush this solution seemed attractive, as it would mean that one could avoid being responsible for possibly breaking up the marriage. The objection to this, though, was that if Mr. B. were not told, then he would go through life thinking that he was carrier of a gene which he did not, in fact, possess. Was he entitled to have this knowledge conveyed to him by the doctor, with whom he had a professional relationship? The doctor clearly owed him a duty, but what were the limits of this?

  Isabel turned the last page of the article. There were the references, all set out in the correct form, but there was no conclusion. Dr. Chao did not know how to resolve the issue that he had raised. That was reasonable enough: it was quite legitimate to ask questions which one could not answer, or which one did not want to answer. But, on the whole, Isabel preferred papers which took a position.

  It occurred to Isabel to ask Grace for her view on this. It was time for morning coffee, anyway, and she had an excuse to go through to the kitchen. There she found Grace, unloading the dishwasher.

  “I am going to tell you a rather tricky story,” said Isabel. “Then I’m going to ask you to give me your reaction. Don’t bother about reasons, just tell me what you would do.”

  She related the story of Mr. and Mrs. B. Grace continued to unload plates as she
listened, but abandoned her work when the story came to an end.

  “I would write Mr. B. a letter,” she said firmly. “I would tell him not to trust his wife.”

  “I see,” said Isabel.

  “But I wouldn’t sign my own name,” Grace added. “I would write anonymously.”

  Isabel could not conceal her surprise. “Anonymously? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” said Grace. “You said that I should not bother with reasons. I should just tell you what I would do. And that’s it.”

  Isabel was silent. She was used to hearing Grace express unusual views, but this curious preference for an anonymous letter astounded her. She was about to press Grace further, but her housekeeper changed the subject.

  “Cat phoned,” she said. “She did not want to disturb you, but she would like to pop in for tea this afternoon. I said that we would let her know.”

  “That’s fine,” said Isabel. “I would like to see her.”

  Truth telling. Paternalism. She was no further forward, she felt, but suddenly she decided. She would ask Grace her views.

  “Here’s another one, Grace,” she said. “Imagine that you found out that Toby was seeing another girl and not telling Cat about it. What would you do?”

  Grace frowned. “Difficult,” she said. “I don’t think I’d tell Cat.”

  Isabel relaxed. At least they thought the same way on that issue.

  “But then,” Grace went on, “I think I’d probably go to Toby and tell him that unless he gave Cat up, I’d tell the other girl. That way I’d get rid of him, because I wouldn’t want somebody like that to marry Cat. That’s what I’d do.”

  Isabel nodded. “I see. And you’d have no hesitation in doing that?”

  “None,” said Grace. “None at all.” Then she added, “Not that this would ever happen, would it?”

  Isabel hesitated; here was another occasion on which a lie could slip out. And the moment’s hesitation was enough.

  “Oh my God!” said Grace. “Poor Cat! Poor girl! I never liked that boy, you know, never. I didn’t like to say it, but now you know. Those strawberry jeans of his, you know the ones he wears? I knew what they meant, right from the beginning. See? I knew.”