The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CAT ARRIVED FOR TEA at three-thirty, having left Eddie in charge of the shop. She was let into the house by Grace, who looked at her strangely, or so Cat thought; but then Grace was strange, she always had been, and Cat had always known that. Grace had theories and convictions about virtually everything, and one never knew what was going on in her head. How Isabel put up with those conversations in the kitchen, Cat had no idea. Perhaps she ignored most of it.

  Isabel was in her summerhouse, correcting proofs. The summerhouse was a small octagonal building, constructed of wood and painted dark green. It stood at the back, against the high stone wall that enclosed the garden; in his illness her father had spent whole days in it, looking out over the lawn, thinking and reading, although it was hard for him to turn the pages and he would wait for Isabel to do that. For some years after his death she had been unable to go into it, such were the memories, but gradually she had taken to working in it, even in winter, when it could be heated by a Norwegian wood-burning stove which stood in one corner. It was largely undecorated, save for three framed photographs which had been hung on the back wall. Her father, in the uniform of the Cameronians, in Sicily, under a harsh sun, standing in front of a requisitioned villa; all that bravery and sacrifice, so long ago, for a cause that was utterly, utterly right. Her mother—sainted American mother; once awkwardly referred to by Grace as her sanitized/American mother—sitting with her father in a café in Venice. And herself as a child with her parents, on a picnic, she thought. Foxed at the edges, the photographs needed restoration, but at present they were undisturbed.

  It was a warm day for spring—more of a summer’s day, really—and she had opened the double glass doors of the summerhouse. Now she saw Cat approaching her across the lawn, a small brown bag in her hand. It would be something from the delicatessen; Cat never came empty-handed, and would give Isabel a small jar of truffle pâté or olives picked at random from the shelves of her shop.

  “Belgian chocolate mice,” said Cat, laying the packet on the table.

  “Cats bring mice as an offering,” remarked Isabel, laying the proofs to one side. “My aunt—your great-aunt—had a cat which caught mice and put them on her bed. So thoughtful.”

  Cat sat down on the wicker chair next to Isabel’s. “Grace tells me that you’re in seclusion,” she said. “Not to be disturbed except by me.”

  That was tactful of Grace, thought Isabel. It was not helpful to mention Jamie too often.

  “Life has been getting rather complicated,” said Isabel. “I wanted a day or two to get on with some work and decomplicate. I’m sure you know how it feels.”

  “Yes,” said Cat. “Curl-up-and-get-away-from-it-all days. I have them too.”

  “Grace will bring us tea and we can have a chat,” said Isabel. “I’ve done enough work for the day.”

  Cat smiled. “And I’m going to throw in the towel too,” she said. “Eddie can look after things until closing time. I’m going to go home and get changed. Then I … we’re going out.”

  “Good,” said Isabel. We. Toby, of course.

  “We’re going to celebrate,” said Cat, looking sideways at Isabel. “Dinner, then a club.”

  Isabel caught her breath. She had not expected it, but she had dreaded it nonetheless. And now the moment had arrived. “A celebration?”

  Cat nodded. She did not look at Isabel as she spoke, but was staring out over the lawn. Her tone was cautious. “Toby and I are engaged,” she said. “Yesterday evening. We’ll put it in the papers next week. I wanted you to be the first to know.” She paused. “I think that he’s told his parents now, but apart from them, nobody else knows. Only you.”

  Isabel turned to her niece and reached to take her hand. “Darling, well done. Congratulations.” She had mustered a supreme effort, like a singer straining for a high note, but her attempt proved inadequate. Her voice sounded flat and unenthusiastic.

  Cat looked at her. “Do you mean that?”

  “I only want you to be happy,” said Isabel. “If this is what makes you happy, then of course I mean that.”

  Cat weighed these words for a moment. “The congratulations of a philosopher,” she said. “Can’t you say something personal?” She did not give Isabel time to respond, although Isabel had no answer ready and would have had to battle to find one. “You don’t like him, do you? You’re simply not prepared to give him a chance—even for my sake.”

  Isabel lowered her eyes. She could not lie about this. “I haven’t warmed to him. I admit it. But I promise you: I’ll make every effort, even if it’s hard.”

  Cat seized on her words. Her voice was raised now, the indignation coming through. “Even if it’s hard? Why should it be so hard? Why do you have to say that?”

  Isabel was not in control of her emotions. This news was devastating, and she forgot her intention not to mention what she had seen. Now it came out. “I don’t think that he’s faithful to you,” she said. “I’ve seen him with somebody else. That’s why. That’s why.”

  She stopped, horrified by what she had said. She had not meant to say it—she knew it was wrong—and yet it had come out, as if spoken by somebody else. Immediately she felt miserable, thinking: So are wrongs committed, just like that, without thinking. The doing of wrong was not a hard thing, preceded by careful thought; it was a casual thing, done so easily. That was Hannah Arendt’s insight, was it not? The pure banality of evil. Only good is heroic.

  Cat was quite still. Then she shrugged off the hand which Isabel had lightly placed upon her shoulder. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You say that you’ve seen him with another woman. Is that what you say?”

  Isabel nodded. She could not recant now, and that left honesty as the only option. “Yes. I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant to tell you, because I really don’t think that it’s my business to interfere in your affairs. But I did see him. I saw him embracing another girl. He was going to see her. It was in the doorway to her flat. I was … I was passing by. I saw it happen.”

  “Where was this?” she asked quietly. “Where exactly did you see this?”

  “Nelson Street,” said Isabel.

  Cat was silent for a moment. Then she began to laugh, and the tension drained from her. “His sister, Fiona, lives there, you know. Poor Isabel! Of course you had it all mixed up. He often goes to see Fiona. Of course he gives her a kiss. They’re very fond of one another. And it’s a touchy-feely family.”

  No, thought Isabel. They’re not a touchy-feely family; not at least according to my understanding of the term.

  “Actually, it was his sister’s flatmate,” said Isabel. “It wasn’t his sister.”

  “Lizzie?”

  “I have no idea what her name is,” said Isabel.

  Cat snorted. “It’s nonsense,” she said firmly. “You’ve misinterpreted a peck on the cheek. And now you’re not even prepared to accept that you’re wrong. It would be different if you acknowledged that, but you aren’t. You hate him so much.”

  Isabel fought back. “I do not hate him. You have no right to say that.” But she knew that Cat did, for even as she spoke, the image of an avalanche came into her mind, and she felt ashamed.

  Cat now rose to her feet. “I’m very sorry about this. I understand why you might have wanted to tell me what you told me, but I think that you’re being totally unfair. I love Toby. We’re going to get married. That’s all there is to it.” She stepped out of the summerhouse.

  Isabel rose from her chair, scattering the proofs as she did so. “Cat, please. You know how fond I am of you. You know that. Please …” She trailed off. Cat had started to run across the lawn, back to the house. Grace was at the kitchen door, a tray in her hand. She moved to one side to let Cat past, and the tray fell to the ground.

  THE REST OF THE DAY was ruined. After Cat’s departure, Isabel spent an hour or so discussing the situation with Grace, who did her best to be reassuring.

  “She may be like that for the
time being,” she said. “She may have closed her mind to the possibility right now. But she will think about it and the possibility will work away in her mind. She’ll start to think maybe, just maybe, it’s true. And then the scales will begin to fall from her eyes.”

  Isabel thought the situation bleak, but she had to acknowledge that there was something in what Grace had said. “In the meantime she’s not going to forgive me, though.”

  “Probably not,” said Grace, in a matter-of-fact way. “Although it might help if you wrote to her and told her how sorry you were. She’ll get round to forgiving you in due course, but it will be easier if you’ve left the door open.”

  Isabel did as Grace suggested, and wrote a brief letter to Cat. She apologised for the distress she had caused her and hoped that Cat would forgive her. But even as she wrote, Please forgive me, she realised that only a few weeks before she herself had said to Cat, There’s such a thing as premature forgiveness, because a lot of nonsense was talked about forgiveness by those who simply did not grasp (or had never heard of) the point that Professor Strawson had made in Freedom and Resentment about reactive attitudes and how important these were—Peter Strawson, whose name, Isabel noted, could be rendered anagrammatically, and unfairly, as a pen strews rot. We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn’t matter. So we should not forgive prematurely, which is presumably what Pope John Paul II had in mind when he waited for all those years before he went to visit his attacker in his cell. Isabel wondered what the pope had said to the gunman. “I forgive you”? Or had he said something very different, something not at all forgiving? She smiled at the thought; popes were human, after all, and behaved like human beings, which meant that they must look in the mirror from time to time and ask themselves: Is this really me in this slightly absurd outfit, waiting to go out onto the balcony and wave to all these people, with their flags, and their hopes, and their tears?

  A HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPED in a restaurant, after several glasses of Italian wine, and in the company of an attractive young man, was one thing; a hypothesis that could stand the cold light of day was another. Isabel was well aware of the fact that all she had in the case of Minty Auchterlonie was a conjecture. If it was true that there were irregularities in McDowell’s, and if it was true that Mark Fraser had stumbled upon them, then it did not necessarily mean that Paul Hogg was implicated. Isabel’s idea about how he could be implicated was feasible, she supposed, but no more than that. McDowell’s was a large firm, she understood, and there was no reason why Paul Hogg should be the one to whom Mark’s discovery related.

  Isabel realised that if she wished to develop a firmer foundation for her hypothesis, indeed if she wished to make it remotely credible, then she would need to find out more about McDowell’s, and that would not be easy. She would need to talk to people in the financial world; they would know even if they did not work in McDowell’s itself. The Edinburgh financial community had all the characteristics of a village, as did the legal community, and there would be gossip. But she would need more than that: she would need to discover how one might be able to find out whether somebody had traded improperly on private information. Would this involve monitoring share transactions? How on earth would one go about that, trying to glean information about who bought what in all the millions of transactions that take place on the stock exchanges every year? And of course people would be careful to cover their tracks through the use of nominees and offshore agents. If there were very few prosecutions for insider trading—and indeed hardly any convictions—this was for good reason. One simply could not prove it. And if that was the case, then anything that Minty did with the information she gathered from her fiancé would be impossible to track down. Minty could act with impunity, unless—and this was a major qualification—unless the somebody from within, somebody like Mark Fraser, could link her transactions with information which he knew Paul Hogg would have possessed. But Mark, of course, was dead. Which meant that she would have to go and see her friend Peter Stevenson, financier, discreet philanthropist, and chairman of the Really Terrible Orchestra.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WEST GRANGE HOUSE was a large square house, built in the late eighteenth century and painted white. It stood in large grounds in the Grange, a well-set suburb that rubbed shoulders with Morningside and Bruntsfield, an easy walk from Isabel’s house and an easier one from Cat’s delicatessen. Peter Stevenson had wanted the house for as long as he could remember and had leapt at the chance to buy it when it unexpectedly came on the market.

  Peter had been a successful merchant banker and had decided in his mid-forties to pursue an independent career as a company doctor. Firms in financial trouble could call on him to attempt a rescue, or firms with bickering boards could invite him in to mediate their squabbles. In his quiet way he had brought peace to troubled business lives, persuading people to sit down and examine their issues one by one.

  “Everything has a solution,” he observed to Isabel in answer to a question she put to him about his work as he showed her into his morning room. “Everything. All you have to do is to strip the problem down and then start from there. All one has to do is to make a list and be reasonable.”

  “Which people often aren’t,” said Isabel.

  Peter smiled. “You can work round that. Most people can become reasonable even if they aren’t in the beginning.”

  “Except for some,” Isabel had persisted. “The profoundly unreasonable. And there are quite a few of those, quick and dead. Idi Amin and Pol Pot, to name two.”

  Peter reflected on her turn of phrase. Who still spoke of the quick and the dead? Most people had lost that understanding of “quick” and would look blank if they heard it. How typical of Isabel to keep a word alive, like a gardener tending to a feeble plant. Good for Isabel.

  “The irretrievably unreasonable tend not to run businesses,” he said, “even if they try to run countries. Politicians are different from businessmen or company people. Politics attracts quite the wrong sort of person.”

  Isabel agreed. “Absolutely. All those overgrown egos. It’s why they go into politics in the first place. They want to dominate others. They enjoy power and its trappings. Few of them go into politics because they want to improve the world. Some might, I suppose, but not many.”

  Peter thought for a moment. “Well, there are the Gandhis and the Mandelas, I suppose, and President Carter.”

  “President Carter?”

  Peter nodded. “A good man. Far too gentle for politics. I think that he found himself in the White House by mistake. And he was far too honest. He made those embarrassingly honest remarks about his private temptations, and the press had a field day. And every single one of those who took him to task would have harboured exactly the same sort of thoughts themselves. Who hasn’t?”

  “I know all about fantasies,” said Isabel. “I know what he meant …” She paused. Peter looked at her quizzically, and she continued quickly, “Not that sort of fantasy. I have thoughts about avalanches …”

  Peter smiled and gestured to a chair. “Well, chacun à son rêve.”

  Isabel sat back in her chair and looked out over the lawn. The garden was larger than her own, and more open. Perhaps if she cut down a tree she would get more light, but she knew that she could never do that; she would have to go before the trees went. Oak trees were sobering in that respect; every time you looked at them they reminded you that they were likely to be around well after you had gone.

  She looked at Peter. He was a bit like an oak tree, she thought; not to look at, of course—in that respect he was more of a wisteria, perhaps—but he was a person whom one could trust. Moreover, he was discreet, and one could talk to him without fear of what one said being broadcast. So if she asked him about McDowell’s, as she now did, nobody else would know she was interested
.

  He pondered her question for a moment. “I know quite a few of the people there,” he said. “They’re pretty sound, as far as I know.” He paused. “But I do know of somebody who might talk to you about them. I think he’s just left after some sort of spat. He might be prepared to talk.”

  Isabel answered quickly. This was exactly what she had wanted; Peter knew everybody and could put you in touch with anyone. “That’s exactly what I would like,” she said, adding, “Thank you.”

  “But you have to be careful,” Peter continued. “First, I don’t know him myself, so I can’t vouch for him. And then you have to bear in mind that he might have some sort of grudge against them. You never know. But if you want to see him, he sometimes comes to our concerts because he has a sister who plays in the orchestra. So you need to come to our concert tomorrow night. I’ll make sure you get the chance to talk to him at the party afterwards.”

  Isabel laughed. “Your orchestra? The Really Terrible Orchestra?”

  “The very same,” said Peter. “I’m surprised you haven’t been to one of our concerts before. I’m sure I invited you.”

  “You did,” said Isabel, “but I was away at the time. I was sorry to miss it. I gather that it was …”

  “Terrible,” said Peter. “Yes, we’re no good at all, but we have fun. And most of the audience comes to laugh, anyway, so it doesn’t matter how badly we play.”

  “As long as you do your best?”

  “Exactly. And our best, well, I’m afraid it’s not very good. But there we are.”

  Isabel looked out over the lawn. It interested her that those who had done one thing very well in their lives would often try to master something else, and fail. Peter had been a very successful financier; now he was a very marginal clarinettist; success undoubtedly made failure easier to bear, or did it? Perhaps one became accustomed to doing things well and then felt frustrated when one did other things less well. But Isabel knew that Peter was not driven in this way; he was happy to play the clarinet modestly, as he put it.