The Prisoner's Dilemma

by Sean Stuart O'Connor

  James stared at him in disbelief.

  ‘Do you mean you knew I’d do it?’

  ‘Well,’ replied Dunbeath grimly, ‘I’d have wagered much that one of you would.’

  James’s manner immediately hardened. He stared at Dunbeath.

  ‘Then you might as well have pulled him yourself. You made me do it. You murdered Alistair!’

  ‘No,’ said Dunbeath firmly, and he now looked fiercely into James’s face. ‘You did! And it’s you that will hang if you talk about this.’

  He pulled the huge door open and turned back to the boy.

  ‘But I wouldn’t think too long on it if I were you,’ he added tersely. ‘Have you never seen a map? Don’t you know where we are? We’re the most obscure dot that’s marked in all Scotland, of no interest to anyone. Who will ever know what occurred here tonight? Or care? Go home now. Forget about what happened. Be grateful for your freedom.’

  And with that Dunbeath pushed James through the open door and closed it again with all the finality of the Urquhain’s long tradition of shutting out the inferior beings of the world.

  * * *

  James never knew how he got back to Dunbeaton that night. Weeping and bent, he stumbled through the dunes. It had begun to rain and the frozen air cleared his head enough for him to realise that he had to think. He couldn’t tell the truth. He needed a story. His first thought was that he would say that Alistair had simply fallen off a rock as they’d been gathering mussels. But what were they doing out in the middle of the night? And, anyway, that old drunk McColl knew they were exploring the cave. What if he should blabber the truth?

  At last he reached the cottage and beat loudly on the door.

  ‘Mother! Mother!’ he shouted out as he went in. ‘Father! Quickly!’

  James fell to his knees and sobbed loudly as they ran towards him, panicked by his manner. Bit by bit he stammered out a version of the night’s events. Of how Alistair had begged James to go with him to explore the cave under the castle, fascinated by McColl’s story. Of how Alistair had insisted on going first into the cave but had not reappeared. Of how the waves had pounded and pounded as the tide rushed in.

  ‘It was so fast, so fast!’ he wailed, ‘I waited and waited. I kept calling out for him. But he didn’t answer, he didn’t call back.’

  James fell to the floor and curled up, gasping in his sobs. His mother sat with him, rocking backwards and forwards, still too stunned for grief. But although she was shocked there was disbelief in her thoughts too. She knew that Alistair was a gentle, easily led creature. James had always been the bolder, the more dominant of her two sons. And now this change in them both. How had that happened?

  She rose to her feet and picked up her shawl.

  ‘Come out with me, Andrew,’ she said in a flat, distant voice to her husband ‘we must go down there and look for ourselves.’

  Chapter 3

  Once he’d closed the castle’s great door Dunbeath strolled easily back to his study.

  For an hour or more he sat deep in thought, gazing out of the window at the growing light of the dawn. Eventually he appeared to reach a conclusion. Taking a clean sheet of paper from a drawer, he loaded a quill with ink and quickly wrote a few lines. He then folded the page inwards, scribbled a name and address on the front and sealed the ends with wax, stamped firmly with the crest of his ring.

  Leaving the room he went up a spiral staircase and along a corridor to a small door at the far end. He hammered hard on the wood.

  ‘Annie! Annie woman, come down. I have something for you.’

  He returned to his study and continued to gaze out of the window, his face blank with concentration, as if turning over a puzzle in his mind.

  Annie McKay, his housekeeper, knocked timidly at the open oak door as she came in. She was in her sixties but looked far older. Stooped and beaten by life, her blotched face and half shut eyes showed only too well why she would have slept through the noisy turmoil that had taken place only a couple of hours earlier.

  ‘There you are, Annie,’ said Dunbeath grimly, glancing up at her sodden face. ‘I want you to find someone in the village to take this letter to Edinburgh. A reliable man now. What about that cousin of yours? Tell him to walk to Wick and take the coach down. He’s to wait for an answer.’ He dug in a drawer for some gold coins. ‘Give him these and tell him I expect him back with all speed.’

  Annie nodded and began to collect some of Dunbeath’s discarded dinner plates, but he waved her away with an impatient waft of his hand.

  * * *

  Four days later, Gordon McKay hurried through the wet streets of Edinburgh in the late afternoon, peering up at the houses with the baffled alarm of a country visitor. Lost yet again, he stopped and asked an elderly man the way. At last he found the house he was looking for. He checked the address against the letter, picked up the brass ring set in the lion’s head knocker and timidly brought it down.

  A young maid answered and McKay handed the letter over to her.

  ‘It’s for Mr Hume,’ he said, ‘I’m to wait until he’s read it and then take an answer back.’

  The maid nodded and stepped aside to let him in.

  Ten minutes later David Hume stood at a window in his study holding the letter at an angle to catch the last of the afternoon light. He was tall, but his height was reduced by stooping, and his smooth skin and the babyish colouring of his cheeks were in odd contrast to the corpulence of his frame. He wore a small white wig and he pushed this back now as he read the letter for a second time, his kindly features composed in concentration as he absorbed its contents. Then he folded the paper and put it in the inside pocket of his frock coat. The coat was new that day and as he touched the cloth he realised with delight that there was a sliver of heavy silk that he hadn’t noticed before at the lip of the pocket. He ran his finger over it now with an appreciative smile.

  Today was his thirty fourth birthday and it was one of his great pleasures each year to mark the passage of time with a gift to his wardrobe. This year’s addition was a spectacular success. The tailor was an artist, of that there was no doubt, and all through the day Hume had found himself delighting in the beauty of the gorgeous red coat’s golden embroidery and the warmth of its heavy wool. Yet again his hand moved to feel the craftsmanship of the decorative work at his wrist, his senses secretly comforted by the touch to his fingers.

  He looked through the window into the small garden and picked up a lost train of thought again. The coat had reminded him of his birthday, and his birthday of the march of time. Had he gone forward, he wondered? He turned to look at the study that he loved so much and thought that he had. He was a man that set much store by comfort and order and he felt that the threat of penury, without doubt his greatest anxiety, had retreated further during the year. When he’d left Scotland as an impoverished young man many years before he had worked as a clerk for a sugar importer in Bristol and he liked to keep the memory of those days of repetitive and unimaginative stocktaking fresh in his mind. The work had left him with a fear of tedium and a horror of debt; but it had also given him the determination to earn his living by the power of his intellect and not by meeting the demands of others.

  Yes, there had indeed been progress he felt. The Treatise on Human Nature that he’d worked so hard on had been published eight years earlier and it was now no longer the failure that it had once seemed. He remembered the exhilaration of its first appearance and then the terrible depression that had descended on him when it had – as he now felt able to joke with his friends – fallen ‘dead-born from the press’. But sales had increased steadily over the years since then, as had his fame, and with them had followed the health of his purse and the standing of his reputation.

  It was true that he had no wife yet but he set little store by this shortcoming. He was used to looking after his own needs and he enjoyed the company of men. And, of course, he said to himself, he was yet to meet a woman that he could converse with on the subjects
that interested him.

  And while it was also true that his hopes of a professor’s gown at the University were in ashes he had accepted long ago that if the price of a chair was the rejection of his atheism then this ambition would have to be forever closed to him. Besides, he could be comfortable without it. His friends understood his position, even if they disagreed with it, and the sales from his books, his tutoring and the small amount he received from his family’s rents were more than enough for this friendly house and its good cellar. And the warmth of his new clothes.

  Yet again he was returning to ponder on whether to bring out a revised edition of the Treatise when he heard his maid’s knock on the door. She stood shyly in the doorway, framed by the early evening light.

  ‘Mr Adam Smith is here to see you, sir.’

  Hume smiled broadly.

  ‘Good, good. Show him in, please.’

  And here was a further pleasure to mark his birthday, he thought to himself. He had heard so much about this Mr Smith and was greatly looking forward to spending an evening with him. Smith was by all accounts a prodigy, some were even claiming him to be a genius, and although he was not yet twenty three he was already being spoken of by Hume’s friends as the coming man.

  But there were other stories about him too and Hume smiled to himself as he recalled some of the things he’d heard. Of Smith’s great intellect and insights there was never anything but confirmation. But what a strange fish he was said to be, speaking rapidly to the empty air as if he was arguing with himself and beaming suddenly into the winds to his imaginary friends.

  ‘Still, he has the most beautiful smile a man ever witnessed,’ Hume’s friend Bruce McLean had said. ‘There isn’t a bad bone in his body’.

  It now seemed that half the people of Edinburgh were laughing as every day brought new stories of Smith’s absent mindedness. Charles Townshend had told Hume that he’d been in mid-conversation with him when Smith had fallen backwards into a tanning pit. Another friend had regaled a group of them with the story of how the young man had been so deep in a daydream that he’d found himself in his undershirt, lost in the streets, and had to ask a drayman to bring him back to his lodgings. Hume beamed again at the memory.

  There were footsteps in the corridor as the maid returned. She stood to one side of the door as Adam Smith followed her into the room, walking in a kind of sideways shuffle and with his eyes fixed firmly on the opposite wall to where Hume stood.

  He was tall and slight with a strongly pronounced nose and he seemed so very young and so awkward and disjointed that Hume had the impression an outsized boy was in his room. He was dressed in a plain blue frock coat with a simple neckerchief at the throat and his own hair pulled back in a bow. He now stood motionless, frozen stiff, apparently studying a spot on the skirting board.

  David Hume smiled and held out a hand towards the thin figure’s hunched back.

  ‘Ah, the famous Mr Smith. How very good of you to come.’

  Smith gave a tiny sigh and turned round in a kind of high stepping dance. His eyes followed and at last they slowed their frantic jumping and settled on Hume - and he smiled in reply. Good Lord, what a smile, thought Hume, his atheism dropped in his surprise. So it was true, Adam Smith did indeed have the most benign appearance he’d ever seen, with the smile of a man so completely absorbed in his own intelligence that he had no fear of another’s thoughts nor, Hume guessed, much use for their company.

  ‘Mr Smith,’ said Hume again, now more softly, ‘I trust you will stay for dinner. There are lambs already on the hills. And one has kindly laid down its life for us.’

  * * *

  Three hundred miles further north a storm had raged for three days after the two boys had been in the castle and a proper search for Alistair’s body had been impossible. But with a lull in the weather on the next day, James and his father had approached the sea wall at low tide and James showed him the gap in the rocks that formed the entrance to the cave.

  The surf was still high after the storm, far higher than it had been on the night that the brothers had made their break-in, and the two men had great difficulty even standing on the boulder, let alone making an attempt on searching the cave.

  ‘By God, but it’s dangerous in there,’ said his father grimly. ‘Poor Ally. Poor, poor Ally. No wonder he was trapped. What was he thinking?’

  He came to a sudden stop and James glanced anxiously over at him. His father continued to stare into what he believed was his son’s death trap and James saw his chest heave with the effort of swallowing down his grief.

  ‘What can we do but hope he’ll be washed out soon?’ Andrew McLeish managed to get out eventually in a voice strangled with suffering, ‘I’d ask no man to go in there to fetch him.’ Like his sons he had been a fisherman all his life and the work had taught him many reasons to fear the power of the sea. Above all, he’d learnt the value of patience.

  James looked away and breathed deeply for the first time in days. He glanced down at the gap in the rocks for one final time and then set off with his father for the sad, silent walk back to Dunbeaton.

  But, the following evening he returned again, this time on his own. He made his way down from the dunes towards the beach, his expression blank but his mind racing. He stood looking at the gigantic structure of the castle, its enormous bulk sharp against the twilight. His face tightened as he saw a light from the windows in the observatory and he turned round to find a better place from which he could look up at it.

  * * *

  With a wave of his arm Hume directed Adam Smith into a small, panelled dining room in which a round table had been set for two.

  Smith was shown to his chair and quietly gazed about himself without any sign of being overawed by the older man. David Hume leant over him as he poured his guest a glass of wine and then straightened as he said how delighted he’d been when he was introduced to him at Lady Culdross’s house the previous Wednesday – and how much he had hoped that he would agree to come to visit him this evening.

  ‘Your reputation goes before you,’ Hume went on. ‘Why, Francis Hutcheson, your professor at Glasgow, told me he had nothing left to teach you. And William Scott spoke highly of the great impression you made at Oxford.’

  Smith smiled his sweet smile as he stared down at his glass but showed no sign of replying. After a pause Hume shrugged slightly and continued.

  ‘We are both interested, are we not, in the workings of our human kin. Of course we are indebted in this to the great Englishmen, John Locke and Mr Hobbes, and even those Frenchmen, Monsieur Descartes and that delightful fellow, Voltaire. But in our own Scottish way I hope that we might also bring in a harvest from the fields of moral philosophy. Who knows, we may yet take our place in revealing some of the secrets of our nature.’

  Hume looked up to see Adam Smith’s ingenuous face now apparently transfixed by the candlestick. Could he be listening, he wondered? Yes, he thought he was. But what a very strange person he seemed. David Hume gave a slight cough and then decided to press on.

  ‘So, Mr Smith, perhaps you’d be so kind as to outline for me your recent work and thinking? I would be very interested to hear of it.’

  A peculiar change seemed to come over Adam Smith. His eyes left the candlestick and set off on a hectic journey around the room before they came to settle at last, staring upwards at the edge of the cornice. Then the words that had seemed so reluctant to come before, now tumbled out unchecked.

  ‘My thinking? I know not why you should take any interest in my poor efforts. I have scarcely left Balliol these ten weeks. But I’m much affected that you should even ask. What are my thoughts? Well, I have few compared to yourself. I have twice read your Treatise on Human Nature; in fact, I was punished at Oxford for reading such a heretical work. But, sir, I think of you as Giotto drawing his perfect circle – we are all of us at your feet – and indeed there was much in your Treatise that I found interesting. Yes, much.’

  Hume gave a wry laugh and w
aved his hand in mock protest.

  ‘Yes, yes, but I notice you say ‘much’ rather than ‘all”. He laughed again and continued in an easy-going tone. ‘It’s not often that I’m weighed in such a way. On the contrary, I have been reproached many times for what I say in the Treatise and yet other readers have been kind enough to praise it. But rarely have I been so reproached with praise in the way you put it.’

  Keeping his eyes on Adam Smith, Hume leant forward to pick up his wine. He had been expecting a response from the young man but Smith simply brought his gaze down from the ceiling to his plate and he now stared at it in silence.

  Hume decided to press on.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said with a shrewd glance, ‘I’m far more interested in hearing your views on those parts of the Treatise with which you disagree.’

  Adam Smith’s eyes took up their restless flitting for a few moments and then, to Hume’s surprise, settled on the older man’s head as if he was studying the structure of his wig. He peered at it intently and then seemed to gather himself for a second before he launched into an answer.

  ‘Well sir,’ he said in his unchecked way, ‘like yourself I would insist on this fundamental observation of our human nature: that life is a pitiless struggle between creatures and that our first thought is always to look to our own needs. This is nothing but the struggle for existence and although we may strive to disguise it, at base, we care for nothing but our own survival.

  ‘Yet I was greatly struck,’ he continued, ‘by the observation you make in the Treatise that we are motivated not only by self-interest but by benevolence – a love for mankind. In fact, you say that man is naturally benevolent. And it is from this benevolence that you believe that trust in society arises.’