The Sunday Philosophy Club

  Jamie shrugged. “I had friends. But none I stuck to for years and years. Nobody I could sing that about.”

  “How sad,” said Isabel. “And do you not regret it?”

  Jamie thought for a moment. “I suppose I do,” he said. “I’d like to have lots of friends.”

  “You could get lots of friends,” said Isabel. “You people—at your age—you can make friends so easily.”

  “But I don’t,” said Jamie. “I just want…”

  “Of course,” said Isabel. She lowered the keyboard cover and rose to her feet.

  “We shall go through for dinner now,” she said. “That’s what we shall do. But first …”

  She turned back to the piano and began to play once more, and Jamie smiled. “Soave sia il vento,” may the breeze be gentle, the breeze that takes your vessel on its course; may the waves be calm. An aria more divine than anything else ever written, thought Isabel, and expressing such a kind sentiment too, what one might wish for anybody, and oneself too, although one knew that sometimes it was not like that, that sometimes it was quite different.

  AT THE END of their dinner, which they ate in the kitchen, seated at the large pine refectory table which Isabel used for informal dinners—the kitchen being warmer than the rest of the house—Jamie remarked: “There’s something you said back there in the music room. You told me about this man, John what’s-he-called …”

  “Liamor. John Liamor.”

  Jamie tried out the name. “Liamor. Not an easy name, is it, because the tongue has to go up for the li and then depress itself for the ah, and then the lips have to do some work. Dalhousie’s much easier. But anyway, what you said has made me think.”

  Isabel reached for her coffee cup. “I’m happy to be thought provocative.”

  “Yes,” Jamie went on. “How exactly does one get involved with somebody who doesn’t make you happy? He didn’t make you happy, did he?”

  Isabel looked down at her place mat—a view of the Firth of Forth from the wrong side, from Fife. “No, he did not. He made me very unhappy.”

  “But did you not see that near the beginning?” asked Jamie. “I don’t want to pry, but I’m curious. Didn’t you see what it was going to be like?”

  Isabel looked up at him. She had had that brief discussion with Grace, but it was not something that she really talked about. And what was there to say, anyway, but to acknowledge that one loved the wrong person and carried on loving the wrong person in the hope that something would change?

  “I was rather smitten by him,” she said quietly. “I loved him so much. He was the only person I really wanted to see, to be with. And the rest didn’t seem to matter so much because of the pain that I knew I’d feel if I gave him up. So I persisted, as people do. They persist.”

  “And …”

  “And one day—we were in Cambridge—he asked me to go with him to Ireland, where he came from. He was going to spend a few weeks with his parents, who lived in Cork. And I agreed to go, and that, I suppose, was when I made the real mistake.”

  She paused. She had not imagined that she would talk to Jamie about this, as it would be admitting him to something that she would rather have kept from him. But he sat there, and looked at her expectantly, and she decided to continue.

  “You don’t know Ireland, do you? Well, let me tell you that they have a very clear idea of who they are and who everybody else is, and what the difference is. John had been a great mocker at Cambridge—he laughed at all the middle-class people he saw about him. He called them petty and small-minded. And then, when we arrived at his parents’ place in Cork, it was a middle-class bungalow with a Sacred Heart on the kitchen wall. And his mother did her best to freeze me out. That was awful. We had a flaming row after I came right out and asked her whether she disliked me most because I wasn’t a Catholic or because I wasn’t Irish. I asked her which it was.”

  Jamie smiled. “And which was it?”

  Isabel hesitated. “She said … she said, this horrible woman, she said that it was because I was a slut.”

  She looked up at Jamie, who stared back at her wide-eyed. Then he smiled. “What a …” He trailed off.

  “Yes, she was, and so I insisted to John that we leave, and we went off to Kerry and ended up in a hotel down there, where he asked me to marry him. He said that if we were married, then we could get a college house when we went back to Cambridge. So I said yes. And then he said that we would get a genuine Irish priest to do that, a ‘reversed’ as he called them. And I pointed out that he didn’t believe, and so why ask for a priest? And then he replied that the priest wouldn’t believe either.”

  She paused. Jamie had picked up his table napkin and was folding it. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I’m sorry about all that. I shouldn’t have asked you, should I?”

  “I don’t mind,” said Isabel. “But it does show how these big decisions are just drifted into in a rather messy way. And that we can be very wrong about everything. Don’t be wrong in your life, Jamie. Don’t get it all wrong.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE MESSAGE WAS TAKEN by Grace the following morning, when Isabel was out in the garden. The address she was looking for was 48, Warrender Park Terrace, fourth floor right. The name on the door would be Duffus, which was the name of the girl who had shared with Mark Fraser. She was called Henrietta Duffus, but was known as Hen, and the man, the third of the original three flatmates, was Neil Macfarlane. That was all that Cat had managed to come up with, but it was all that she had asked Cat to find out.

  Grace passed on the information to Isabel with a quizzical look, but Isabel decided not to tell her what it was about. Grace had firm views on inquisitiveness and was inevitably discreet in her dealings. She would undoubtedly have considered any enquiries which Isabel was planning to make to be quite unwarranted, and would have made a comment along those lines. So Isabel was silent.

  She had decided to visit the flatmates that evening, as there would be no point in calling during the day, when they would be at work. For the rest of that day she worked on the review, reading several submissions which had arrived in that morning’s post. This was an important screening process. Like any journal, no matter how academic, the review received contributions that were completely unsuitable and which need not even be sent off to a specialist reader. That morning, though, had brought five serious articles, and these would have to be looked at carefully. She settled down at first to a carefully argued piece on rule utilitarianism in the legislative process, leaving the spicier “Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships: A Challenge to Kant” for later in the morning. That was one for after coffee, she thought; she liked to savour criticism of Kant.

  The day passed quickly. The rule utilitarianism article was weighty, but largely unreadable, owing to the author’s style. It appeared to be written in English, but it was a variety of English which Isabel felt occurred only in certain corners of academia, where faux weightiness was a virtue. It was, she thought, as if the English had been translated from German; not that the verbs all migrated to the end, it was just that everything sounded so heavy, so utterly earnest.

  It was tempting to exclude the unintelligible paper on the grounds of grammatical obfuscation, and then to write to the author—in simple terms—and explain to him why this was being done. But she had seen his name and his institution on the title page of the article, and she knew that there would be repercussions if she did this. Harvard!

  “Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships” was more clearly written, but said nothing surprising. We should tell the truth, the author argued, but not the whole truth. There were occasions when hypocrisy was necessary in order to protect the feelings of others. (It was as if the author were echoing her own recently articulated thought on the subject.) So we should not tell our lovers that they are inadequate lovers—if that is what they are. Quite clearly only if that is what they are, thought Isabel. The limits to honesty in that department were particularly severe, and rightly so. r />
  She read the article with some amusement, and thought that it would make a lively read for the review’s subscribers, who perhaps needed a bit of encouragement. The philosophy of sex was an unusual area of applied ethics, but it had its exponents, who met, she knew, at an annual conference in the United States. The review had occasionally published advance notice of these meetings, but she had wondered whether these bland few sentences gave the full story: morning session: Sexual Semiotics and Private Space; coffee; Perversion and Autonomy; lunch (for there were other appetites to consider), and so on into the afternoon. The abstracts of the papers were probably accurate enough, but what, might one wonder, went on afterwards at such a conference? These people were not prudes, she suspected, and they were, after all, applied ethicists.

  Isabel herself was no prude, but she believed very strongly in discretion in sexual matters. In particular, she was doubtful about when it was right, if ever, to publish details of one’s own sexual affairs. Would the other person have consented? she wondered; probably not, and in that case one did another a wrong by writing about what was essentially a private matter between two people. There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers. You should be able to tell your doctor anything, safe in the knowledge that what you said would not go beyond the walls within which it was said, and the same should be true of your lover. And yet this notion was under attack: the state wanted information from doctors (about your genes, about your sexual habits, about your childhood illnesses), and doctors had to resist. And the vulgar curious, of whom there were countless legions, wanted information about your sexual life, and would pay generously to hear it—if you were sufficiently well known. Yet people were entitled to their secrets, to their sense that at least there was some part of their life which they could regard as ultimately, intimately private; because if they were denied this privacy, then the very self was diminished. Let people have their secrets, Isabel thought, although probably unfashionably.

  Unfortunately philosophers were notable offenders when it came to self-disclosure. Bertrand Russell had done this, with his revealing diaries, and A. J. Ayer too. Why did these philosophers imagine that the public should be interested in whether or not they slept with somebody, and how often? Were they trying to prove something? Would she have resisted Bertrand Russell? she wondered; and answered her own question immediately. Yes. And A. J. Ayer too.

  By six o’clock the backlog of articles had been cleared and covering letters had been written to referees in respect of those which were going to be taken to the next stage. She had decided that six-thirty would be the ideal time to call at number 48, Warrender Park Terrace, as this would give the flatmates time to return from work (whatever that was) and yet would not interfere with their dinner arrangements. Leaving her library, she went through to the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee before setting off.

  It was not a long walk to Warrender Park Terrace, which lay just beyond the triangle of park at the end of Bruntsfield Avenue. She took her time, looking in shopwindows before finally strolling across the grass to the end of the terrace. Although it was a pleasant spring evening, a stiff breeze had arisen and the clouds were scudding energetically across the sky, towards Norway. This was a northern light, the light of a city that belonged as much to the great, steely plains of the North Sea as it did to the soft hills of its hinterland. This was not Glasgow, with its soft, western light, and its proximity to Ireland and to the Gaeldom of the Highlands. This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.

  She reached Warrender Park Terrace and followed it round its slow curve. It was a handsome street, occupying one side of the road and looking out over the Meadows and the distant pinnacled roofs and spires of the old infirmary. The building, a high tenement in the Victorian manner, rose in six stories of dressed stone, topped with a high-raked slate roof. Some of these roofs were bordered with turrets, like the slated turrets of French châteaux, with ironwork devices at the point. Or the edge of the roofs had stone crenellations, carved thistles, the occasional gargoyle, all of which would have given the original occupants the sense that they were living in some style, and that all that distinguished their dwellings from those of the gentry was mere size. But in spite of these conceits, they were good flats, solidly built, and although originally intended for petit-bourgeois occupation they had become the preserve of students and young professionals. The flat she was visiting must have been typical of numerous such establishments rented by groups of three or four young people. The generous size of the flats made it possible for each tenant to have his or her own room without impinging upon the largish living room and dining room. It would be a comfortable arrangement, which would serve the residents until marriage or cohabitation beckoned. And of course such flats were the breeding ground of lasting friendships—and lasting enmities too, she supposed.

  The flats were built around a common stone staircase, to which access would be gained by an imposing front door. These doors were usually locked, but could be opened from the flats above by the pressing of a button. Isabel looked at the range of bells at the front door and found one labelled “Duffus.” She pushed it and waited. After a minute or so a voice sounded through the small speaker of the intercom and asked her what she wanted.

  Isabel bent to speak into the tiny microphone on the intercom box. She gave her name and explained that she would like to speak to Miss Duffus. It was in connection with the accident, she added.

  There was a brief pause, and then the buzzer sounded. Isabel pushed the door open and began to climb up the stairs, noting that stale, slightly dusty smell which seemed to hang in the air of so many common stairs. It was the smell of stone which has been wet and now has dried, coupled with the slight odour of cooking that would waft out of individual flats. It was a smell that reminded her of childhood, when she had gone every week up such a stairway to her piano lessons at the house of Miss Marilyn McGibbon—Miss McGibbon, who had referred to music which starred her; which meant she was stirred. Isabel still thought of starring music.

  She paused, and stood still for a moment, remembering Miss McGibbon, whom she had liked as a child, but from whom she had picked up, even as a child, a sense of sadness, of something unresolved. Once she had arrived for her lesson and had found her red-eyed, with marks of tears on the powder which she applied to her face, and had stared at her mutely until Miss McGibbon had turned away, mumbling: “I am not myself. I apologise. I am not myself this afternoon.”

  And Isabel had said: “Has something sad happened?”

  Miss McGibbon had started to say yes, but had changed it to no, and had shaken her head, and they had turned to the scales which Isabel had learned and to Mozart, and nothing more had been said. Later, as a young adult, she had learned quite by chance that Miss McGibbon had lost her friend and companion, one Lalla Gordon, the daughter of a judge of the Court of Session, who had been forced to choose between her family (who disapproved of Miss McGibbon) and her friendship, and who had chosen the former.

  THE FLAT WAS ON the fourth floor and by the time that Isabel had reached the landing, the door was already slightly ajar. A young woman was standing just within the hall, and she opened the door as Isabel approached. Isabel smiled at her, taking in at a glance Hen Duffus’s appearance: tall, almost willowy, and wide-eyed in that appealing, doelike way which Isabel always associated with girls from the west coast of Scotland, but which presumably had nothing to do with that at all. Her smile was returned as Hen asked her to come in. Yes, Isabel thought as she heard the accent: the west, although not Glasgow, as Cat had said, but somewhere small and couthy, Dunbarton perhaps, Helensburgh at a stretch. But she was definitely not a Henrietta; Hen, yes; that was far more suitable.

  “I’m sorry to come unannounced. I hoped I might just find you in. You and …”

  ?
??Neil. I don’t think he’s in. But he should be back soon.”

  Hen closed the door behind them and pointed to a door down the hallway. “We can go through there,” she said. “It’s the usual mess, I’m afraid.”

  “No need to apologise,” said Isabel. “We all live in a mess. It’s more comfortable that way.”

  “I’d like to be tidy,” said Hen. “I try, but I guess you can’t be what you aren’t.”

  Isabel smiled, but said nothing. There was a physicality about this woman, an air of … well, sexual energy. It was unmistakable, like musicality, or asceticism. She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

  The living room, into which Hen led Isabel, looked out to the north, over the trees that lined the southern edge of the Meadows. The windows, which were generous Victorian, must have flooded the room with light in the day; even now, in the early evening, the room needed no lights. Isabel crossed the room to stand before one of the windows. She looked down. Below them on the cobbled street, a boy dragged a reluctant dog on a lead. The boy bent down and struck the dog on the back, and the animal turned round in self-defence. Then the boy kicked it in the ribs and dragged on the lead again.

  Hen joined her at the window and looked down too. “He’s a wee brat, that boy. I call him Soapy Soutar. He lives in the ground-floor flat with his mother and a bidie-in. I don’t think that dog likes any of them.”

  Isabel laughed. She appreciated the reference to Soapy Soutar; every Scottish child used to know about Oor Wullie and his friends Soapy Soutar and Fat Boab, but did they now? Where do the images of Scottish childhood come from now? Not, she thought, from the streets of Dundee, those warm, mythical streets which the Sunday Post peopled with pawky innocents.

  They turned away from the window and Hen looked at Isabel. “Why have you come to see us? You aren’t a journalist, are you?”

  Isabel shook her head vigorously. “Certainly not. No, I was a witness. I saw it happen.”