The Sunday Philosophy Club

  Isabel felt grateful for her niece’s good nature, even if an aspect of that same nature was a lack of judgement when it came to men. There were many young women who would not so readily have forgiven the intrusion; and of course there were fewer still who would have admitted that an aunt was right in such a matter. Of course, this was welcome news, and Isabel looked forward to finding out how Toby had been exposed; perhaps Cat had followed him, as she herself had, and had been led to a conclusion by that most convincing of evidence—the evidence of one’s own eyes.

  She walked into Bruntsfield, savouring the warmth which was beginning to creep into the sun. There was building work in Merchiston Crescent—a new house was being crammed into a small corner plot, and there was a bag of cement on the muddy pavement. Then, a few steps later, she saw gulls, circling above roofs, looking for a place to nest. The gulls were considered pests in the neighbourhood—large, mewing birds that swooped down on those who came too close to their nesting places—but we humans built too, and left cement and stones and litter, and were as aggressively territorial. The review was planning an environmental ethics issue the following year and Isabel had been soliciting papers. Perhaps somebody would write about the ethics of litter. Not that there was much to say about that: litter was unquestionably bad and surely nobody would make a case in its favour. And yet why was it wrong to drop litter? Was it purely an aesthetic objection, based on the notion that the superficial pollution of the environment was unattractive? Or was the aesthetic impact linked to some notion of the distress which others felt in the face of litter? If that was the case, then we might even have a duty to look attractive to others, in order to minimise their distress. There were interesting implications to that.

  And one of these implications presented itself to Isabel a mere fifty paces later, outside the post office, from which emerged a young man in his mid-twenties—Jamie’s age, perhaps—with several sharp metal spikes inserted into his lower lip and chin. The sharp metal points jutted out jauntily, like tiny sharpened phalluses, which made Isabel reflect on how uncomfortable it must have been to kiss a man like that. Beards were one thing—and there were women who complained vigorously about the reaction of their skins to contact with bearded men—but how much more unpleasant it would be to feel these metal spikes up against one’s lips and cheeks. Cold, perhaps; sharp, certainly; but then, who would wish to kiss this young man, with his scowl and his discouraging look? Isabel asked herself the question and answered it immediately: of course numerous girls would wish to kiss him, and probably did; girls who had rings in their belly buttons and their noses, and who wore studded collars. Spikes and rings were complementary; after all. All this young man would have to do was look for the corresponding plumage.

  As she crossed the road to Cat’s delicatessen, Isabel saw the spiky young man dart across the road ahead of her and suddenly stumble at the edge of the pavement. He tripped and fell, landing on a knee on the concrete paving stone. Isabel, a few steps behind him, hastened to his side and reached out to him, helping him to his feet. He stood up, and looked down at the ripped knee of his discoloured denim jeans. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

  “Thank you.” His voice was soft, with a hint of Belfast in it.

  “It’s so easy to stumble,” said Isabel. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. I’ve torn my jeans, that’s all. Still, you pay for ripped jeans these days. I got mine free.”

  Isabel smiled, and suddenly the words came out of her, unbidden, unanticipated. “Why have you got those spikes in your face?”

  He did not look annoyed. “My face? These piercings?” He fingered at the spike which projected from his lower lip. “It’s my jewellery, I suppose.”

  “Your jewellery?” Isabel stared at him, noticing the tiny golden ring which he had inserted into an eyebrow.

  “Yes,” said the young man. “You wear jewellery. I wear jewellery. I like it. And it shows that I don’t care.”

  “Don’t care about what?”

  “About what people think. It shows that I have my own style. This is me. I’m not in anybody’s uniform.”

  Isabel smiled at him. She appreciated his directness, and she liked his voice with its definite cadences. “Good for you,” she said. “Uniforms are not a good idea.” She paused. The sun was glinting off one of the spikes, casting a tiny, bobbing reflection onto his upper lip. “Unless, of course, you have donned another uniform in your eagerness to avoid uniforms. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

  The young man tossed his head backwards. “Okay,” he said, laughing. “I’m the same as everybody else with piercings. So?”

  ISABEL LOOKED AT HIM. This was a strange conversation, and she would have liked to prolong it. But she reminded herself that she had to see Cat and that she could not spend the morning standing there with that young man discussing facial piercing. So they said good-bye to each other, and she made her way into the delicatessen, where Eddie, standing beside a shelf on which he was stacking Portuguese sardines, glanced at her and then looked back, with some intensity, at the sardines.

  She found Cat in her office, finishing off a telephone call. Her niece replaced the receiver and looked at her. Isabel noticed, with relief, that there seemed to be no resentment in her expression. The card she received had reflected what Cat really felt. Good.

  “You got my card?”

  “Yes, I did. And I’m still very sorry that I upset you. I take no pleasure in hearing about it.” She knew, as she said this, that it was not true, and faltered at the last words.

  Cat smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. But let’s not talk about it if you don’t mind.”

  They drank a cup of coffee together and then Isabel returned home. There was work to do—a new crop of articles had arrived for the review—but she found that she could not settle to it. She wondered when she would hear from Johnny Sanderson, if he would call back at all.

  HE DID TELEPHONE Isabel, as he had said he would, a few days after the Really Terrible Orchestra concert. He could meet her, he said, at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society rooms in Leith that Friday evening at six. There was a whisky nosing, and she could sample the whisky—if she had the stomach for it. He had information for her, which he could pass on at the event itself. There would be opportunities to talk.

  Isabel knew very little about whisky, and rarely drank it. But she knew that it had much the same apparatus of sampling as did wine, even if the language was very different. Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of stale seaweed, or even diesel fuel. Isabel saw the merit in this. The Island malts, which she could barely bring herself to sample—in spite of her father’s enthusiasm for them—reminded her of antiseptic and the smell of the school swimming pool; and as for taste, “diesel fuel” seemed to express it perfectly. Not that she would utter these views in the rooms of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, or even confess them to Johnny Sanderson, who was said by some to have whisky in his veins, on the strength of four generations of Highland distillers in his pedigree, starting, he proudly pointed out, with a humble crofter who ran an illegal still at the back of his sheep fank. Purveyors of alcohol were well known to found dynasties, of course: that was the case, she thought, with a politician whom Isabel’s grandfather had known slightly before the Second World War. Isabel’s grandfather, a principled man, had seen through him and had rebuffed an enticing offer for their company. Thereafter he had merely shuddered when the politician’s name was mentioned, an eloquent enough comment—more expressive, indeed, than mere words.

  Isabel was amused by the idea that gestures should accompany verbal references. She was intrigued to see devout Catholics cross themselves at the mention of the BVM—and she liked the acronym BVM itself, which made Mary sound so reassuringly modern and competent, like a CEO or an ICBM, or even a BMW. And in places like Si
cily, there were people who spat to the side when the names of their enemies were uttered, or as was sometimes the case in Greece, when Turkey or even a Turk was spoken of. She recalled the Greek uncle of a friend of hers, who was protected by his family from all mention of Turkey, lest he have a heart attack. Or the proprietor of a Greek island hotel at which she had once stayed, who refused to acknowledge that the distant coast of Turkey could just be made out from the terrace of the hotel; he simply denied that land could be seen, and did not see it. So might one wish Turkey out of existence, if one were so inclined. All of this was to be avoided, of course, and Isabel knew it. She had never spat at the mention of a name, or even rolled her eyes upwards—well, that perhaps she had done once or twice, when the name of a well-known figure in the arts cropped up. But that, she felt, was fully justified, unlike the views of Greeks on Turks, and of Turks, one imagined, on Greeks.

  Johnny Sanderson was already there when she arrived, and he led her to a quiet seat in the corner of the room.

  “One question right at the beginning,” he said. “Do you like it, or hate it? If you hate it, I’ll get you a glass of wine instead.”

  “I like some whiskies,” said Isabel. “Some.”

  “Such as?”

  “Speysides. Soft whiskies. Whiskies that don’t bite.”

  Johnny nodded. “Reasonable enough,” he said. “Macallan. A lovely fifteen-year-old Speyside. It would offend nobody.”

  Isabel sat back while Johnny went to order the whiskies from the bar. She liked this temple to whisky, with its high ceilings and its airiness. And she liked the people, too: direct and open-faced people who believed in fellowship and good humour. They were people, she imagined, who did not disapprove of their fellow man, unlike those who patrolled mores today; these people were tolerant, just as gourmets, by and large, tended to have tolerant, expansive outlooks. It was the obsessive dieters who were unhappy and anxious.

  A paper had been submitted to the review which suggested that there was a duty to be thin. “Fat Is a Moral Issue” had been the title which the author had chosen; Isabel thought it an intriguing title. But the argument was poor; entirely predictable and entirely depressing. In a world of need, it was wrong to be anything other than thin. Until everybody was in a position to consume a surfeit of calories, then nobody should carry extra weight. The fat were therefore not entitled to be what they were. Fairness of distribution demanded otherwise.

  She had read the paper with increasing irritation, but then, at the end, when she had tossed it aside and gone into the kitchen for a slice of cake, she had paused at the very plate on which the cake rested, and stopped, and thought. The author of “Fat Is a Moral Issue” may have been pious in her tone, but she was right: the claims of the needy for food were moral claims of a particular sort. One could not ignore them—one could not walk away from them, even if those who made them on behalf of the hungry sounded like killjoys. And that, perhaps, was the problem: it was the tone with which the author had made her point—her accusing tone—that had irritated Isabel; it was the moral condescension in it that made her feel that she was being accused of self-indulgence and greed. But the fundamental truth contained in her paper could not be shrugged off: we cannot ignore the pleas of the hungry. And if that meant that we needed to examine the overconsumption which deprived others of food, then that had to be done. And with that thought, she had looked at the cake and then put it back in its tin in the cupboard.

  Johnny raised his glass to her. “This is lovely stuff,” he said. “Fifteen quiet years in its cask. Fifteen years ago I was, let me think, thirty, and we had just had our first child and I thought that I was awfully clever and was going to make a million by forty.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I never made a million. But I reached my fortieth birthday anyway, which is a greater privilege in a way.”

  “Quite,” said Isabel. “Some would give a million for a single year, let alone forty.”

  Johnny looked into his whisky glass. “Greed,” he said. “Greed takes so many forms. Polite or naked. But it’s always the same at heart. Our friend Minty, for example …”

  “You found out something?”

  Johnny looked behind him. A group of people had gathered round a table at the other end of the room. The table was set out with rows of glasses and cut-glass jugs of water.

  “Charlie’s about to begin,” he said. “He’s sniffing the air.”

  Isabel glanced in the direction of the whisky noser, a well-built man in a comfortable tweed suit and sporting a large moustache. She watched as he poured a glass of whisky and held it up against the light.

  “I know him,” she said.

  “Everybody does,” said Johnny. “Charlie Maclean. He can smell whisky from fifty yards. Amazing nose.”

  Isabel looked down at her modest malt and took a small sip of the liquid. “Tell me what you found out about Minty.”

  Johnny shook his head. “Nothing. All I said was that she was greedy, which she undoubtedly is. What I did find out was rather more interesting than that. I found out about what her young friend Ian Cameron has been doing. I knew some of it already, of course, but I gathered quite a bit more from my friends among the discontented in McDowell’s.”

  Isabel said nothing, waiting for him to continue. At the other end of the room, Charlie Maclean was pointing out some quality in the whisky to his attentive audience, one or two of whom were nodding eagerly.

  “But first, you should have a bit of background,” Johnny said. “Firms like McDowell’s are not all that old. They’ve only recently celebrated their twentieth birthday, I think. And they didn’t start with vast resources either—fifty thousand or so would have been all that the original two partners would have brought in. Nowadays, fifty thousand would be small change for them.”

  Isabel watched Johnny as he spoke. He was looking at his whisky glass, turning it gently to drive a thin meniscus of liquid up the sides, exactly as Charlie Maclean was now doing for his audience at the other end of the room.

  “We grew very quickly,” Johnny went on. “We took in pension funds and invested them carefully in solid stocks. The market, of course, was doing well and everything looked very good. By the end of the eighties we were managing more than two billion, and even if our fee was slipping slightly below the half percent we had been taking for our services, you can still imagine what that meant in terms of profit.

  “We took on lots of bright people. We watched what was happening in the Far East and in developing countries. We moved in and out fairly successfully, but of course we had our fingers burned with Internet stocks, as just about everybody did. That was probably the first time we had a fright. I was there then and I remember how the atmosphere changed. I remember Gordon McDowell at one meeting looking as if he’d just seen a ghost. Quite white.

  “But it didn’t bring us down—it just meant that we had to be quicker on our feet. And we also had to work a bit harder to keep our clients, who were very nervous about what was happening to their funds in general and were beginning to wonder whether they would be safer in the City of London. After all, the reason why one went to Edinburgh in the first place was to get solidity and reliability. If Edinburgh started to look shaky, one might as well throw in one’s lot with the riskier side of things in London.

  “It’s about this time that we looked around for some new people. We picked up this Cameron character and a few others like him. He started watching new stocks, which seemed to be about the only place where one could make a decent bit of money. But of course these new issues were subscribed to by the large people in London and New York, and Edinburgh usually wouldn’t get much of a look-in. This was pretty sickening when you saw them go up in value by two or three hundred percent within a few months of issue. And all this profit went to those who were in a cosy relationship with the issuing houses in London and who were given a good allocation.

  “Cameron started to get his hands on to some of these issues. He als
o started to take charge of one or two other things, moving funds slowly out of stocks that were not going to do so well. He’s very good at that, our friend Cameron. Quite a few stocks were quietly disposed of a month or so ahead of a profit warning. Nothing very obvious, but it was happening. I didn’t know about that until I spoke to my friends who had been working with him—I was in a different department. But they told me of two big sales that had taken place in the last six months, both of them before a profit warning.”

  Isabel had been listening intently. This was the flesh that her skeletal theory needed. “And would there be any concrete evidence of insider knowledge in these two cases? Anything one could put one’s finger on?”

  Johnny smiled. “The very question. But I’m afraid that you won’t like the answer. The fact of the matter is that both of these sales were of stocks in companies in which Minty Auchterlonie’s bank was involved as adviser. So she might well have had inside knowledge which she passed on to him. But then, on the other hand, she might not. And there is, in my view, no way in which we could possibly prove it. In each case, I gather, there’s a minute of the meeting at which Cameron raised the possibility of selling the stocks. In both cases he came up with a perfectly cogent reason for doing so.”

  “And yet the real reason may well have been what Minty said to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s no chance of proving that money changed hands between Cameron and Minty?”

  Johnny looked surprised. “I don’t think that money would necessarily change hands—unless he was sharing his bonus with her. No, I think it more likely that they were doing this for mixed motives. She was involved with him sexually and wanted to keep him. That’s perfectly possible. People give their lovers things because they’re their lovers. That’s an old story.”