The Sunday Philosophy Club Read online

  She stopped halfway down the stairs. She was alone, but she had heard something. Or had she imagined it? She strained her ears to catch a sound, but there was nothing. She took a breath. He must have been the very last person up there, all alone, when everybody else had gone and the girl at the bar on the landing was closing up. That boy had been there himself and had looked down, and then he had fallen, silently, perhaps seeing herself and Jennifer on the way down, who would then have been his last human contact.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs. The man in the blue windcheater was there, just a few yards away, and when she came out, he looked at her sternly.

  Isabel walked over to him. “I saw it happen,” she said. “I was in the grand circle. My friend and I saw him fall.”

  The man looked at her. “We’ll need to talk to you,” he said. “We’ll need to take statements.”

  Isabel nodded. “I saw so little,” she said. “It was over so quickly.”

  He frowned. “Why were you up there just now?” he asked.

  Isabel looked down at the ground. “I wanted to see how it could have happened,” she said. “And now I do see.”

  “Oh?”

  “He must have looked over,” she said. “Then he lost his balance. I’m sure it would not be difficult.”

  The man pursed his lips. “We’ll look into that. No need to speculate.”

  It was a reproach, but not a severe one, as he saw that she was upset. For she was shaking now. He was familiar with that. Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AT NINE O’CLOCK the following morning Isabel’s housekeeper, Grace, let herself into the house, picked up the mail from the floor in the hall, and made her way into the kitchen. Isabel had come downstairs and was sitting at the table in the kitchen, the newspaper open before her, a half-finished cup of coffee at her elbow.

  Grace put the letters down on the table and took off her coat. She was a tall woman, in her very late forties, six years older than Isabel. She wore a long herringbone coat, of an old-fashioned cut, and had dark red hair which she wore in a bun at the back.

  “I had to wait half an hour for a bus,” she said. “Nothing came. Nothing.”

  Isabel rose to her feet and went over to the percolator of freshly made coffee on the stove.

  “This will help,” she said, pouring Grace a cup. Then, as Grace took a sip, she pointed to the newspaper on the table.

  “There’s a terrible thing in The Scotsman,” she said. “An accident. I saw it last night at the Usher Hall. A young man fell all the way from the gods.”

  Grace gasped. “Poor soul,” she said. “And …”

  “He died,” said Isabel. “They took him to the Infirmary, but he was declared dead when he arrived.”

  Grace looked at her employer over her cup. “Did he jump?” she asked.

  Isabel shook her head. “Nobody has any reason to believe that.” She stopped. She had not thought of it at all. People did not kill themselves that way; if you wanted to jump, then you went to the Forth Bridge, or the Dean Bridge if you preferred the ground to the water. The Dean Bridge: Ruthven Todd had written a poem about that, had he not, and had said that its iron spikes “curiously repel the suicides”; curiously, because the thought of minor pain should surely mean nothing in the face of complete destruction. Ruthven Todd, she thought, all but ignored in spite of his remarkable poetry; one line of his, she had once said, was worth fifty lines of McDiarmid, with all his posturing; but nobody remembered Ruthven Todd anymore.

  She had seen McDiarmid once, when she was a schoolgirl, and had been walking with her father down Hanover Street, past Milnes Bar. The poet had come out of the bar in the company of a tall, distinguished-looking man, who had greeted her father. Her father had introduced her to both of them, and the tall man had shaken her hand courteously; McDiarmid had smiled, and nodded, and she had been struck by his eyes, which seemed to emit a piercing blue light. He was wearing a kilt, and carrying a small, battered leather briefcase, which he hugged to his chest, as if using it to protect himself against the cold.

  Afterwards her father had said: “The best poet and the wordiest poet in Scotland, both together.”

  “Which was which?” she had asked. They read Burns at school, and some Ramsay and Henryson, but nothing modern.

  “McDiarmid, or Christopher Grieve, to give him his real name, is the wordiest. The best is the tall man, Norman McCaig. But he’ll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one’s soul.” He had paused, and then asked: “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  And Isabel had said, “No.”

  GRACE ASKED HER AGAIN: “Do you think he jumped?”

  “We did not see him actually fall over the edge,” Isabel said, folding the newspaper in such a way as to reveal the crossword. “We saw him on the way down—after he had slipped or whatever. I told the police that. They took a statement from me last night.”

  “People don’t slip that easily,” muttered Grace.

  “Yes, they do,” said Isabel. “They slip. All the time. I once read about somebody slipping on his honeymoon. The couple was visiting some falls in South America and the man slipped.”

  Grace raised an eyebrow. “There was a woman who fell over the crags,” she said. “Right here in Edinburgh. She was on her honeymoon.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Isabel. “Slipped.”

  “Except some thought she was pushed,” countered Grace. “The husband had taken out an insurance policy on her life a few weeks before. He claimed the money, and the insurance company refused to pay out.”

  “Well, it must happen in some cases. Some people are pushed. Others slip.” She paused, imagining the young couple in South America, with the spray from the falls shooting up and the man tumbling into the white, and the young bride running back along the path, and the emptiness. You loved another, and this made you so vulnerable; just an inch or so too close to the edge and your world could change.

  She picked up her coffee and began to leave the kitchen. Grace preferred to work unobserved, and she herself liked to do the crossword in the morning room, looking out onto the garden. This had been the ritual for years, from the time that she had moved back into the house until now. The crossword would start the day, and then she would glance at the news itself, trying to avoid the salacious court cases which seemed to take up more and more newspaper columns. There was such an obsession with human weakness and failing; with the tragedies of peoples’ lives; with the banal affairs of actors and singers. You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seemed to her to be voyeurism, or even a form of moralistic tale telling. And yet, she thought, do I not read these things myself? I do. I am just as bad as everybody else, drawn to these scandals. She smiled ruefully, noticing the heading: MINISTER’S SHAME ROCKS PARISH. Of course she would read that, as everybody else would, although she knew that behind the story was a personal tragedy, and all the embarrassment that goes with that.

  She moved a chair in the morning room so that she would be by the window. It was a clear day, and the sun was on the blossom on the apple trees which lined one edge of her walled garden. The blossom was late this year, and she wondered whether there would be apples again this summer. Every now and then the trees became barren and produced no fruit; then, the following year, they would be laden with a proliferation of small red apples that she would pick and make into chutney and sauce according to a recipe which her mother had given her.

  Her mother—her sainted American mother—had died when Isabel was eleven, and the memories were fading. Months and years blurred into one another, and Isabel’s mental picture of the face that looked down at her as she was tucked into bed at night was vague now. She could hear the voice, thoug
h, echoing somewhere in her mind; that soft southern voice that her father had said reminded him of moss on trees and characters from Tennessee Williams plays.

  Seated in the morning room with a cup of coffee, her second, on the glass-topped side table, she found herself stuck over the crossword puzzle at an inexplicably early stage. One across had been a gift, almost an insult—They have slots in the gaming industry (3-5-7). One-armed bandits. And then, He’s a German in control (7). Manager, of course. But after a few of this standard, she came across Excited by the score? (7) and Vulnerable we opined desultorily (4, 4), both of which remained unsolved, and ruined the rest of the puzzle. She felt frustrated, and cross with herself. The clues would resolve themselves in due course, and come to her later in the day, but for the time being she had been defeated.

  She knew, of course, what was wrong. The events of the previous night had upset her, perhaps more than she realised. She had had trouble in getting to sleep, and had awoken in the small hours of the morning, got out of bed, and gone downstairs to fetch a glass of milk. She had tried to read, but had found it difficult to concentrate, and had switched off the light and lain awake in bed, thinking about the boy and that handsome, composed face. Would she have felt differently if it had been somebody older? Would there have been the same poignancy had the lolling head been grey, the face lined with age rather than youthful?

  A night of interrupted sleep, and a shock like that—it was small wonder that she could not manage these obvious clues. She tossed the newspaper down and rose to her feet. She wanted to talk to somebody, to discuss what had happened last night. There was no point in discussing it further with Grace, who would only engage in unlikely speculation and would wander off into long stories about disasters which she had heard about from friends. If urban myths had to start somewhere, Isabel thought that they might begin with Grace. She would walk to Bruntsfield, she decided, and speak to her niece, Cat. Cat owned a delicatessen on a busy corner in the popular shopping area, and provided that there were not too many customers, she would usually take time off to drink a cup of coffee with her aunt.

  Cat was sympathetic, and if Isabel ever needed to set things in perspective, her niece would be her first port of call. And it was the same for Cat. When she had difficulties with boyfriends—and such difficulties seemed to be a constant feature of her life—that was the subject of exchanges between the two of them.

  “Of course, you know what I’m going to tell you,” Isabel had said to her six months before, just before the arrival of Toby.

  “And you know what I’ll say back to you.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I suppose I do. And I know that I shouldn’t say this, because we shouldn’t tell others what to do. But—”

  “But you think I should go back to Jamie?”

  “Precisely,” said Isabel, thinking of Jamie, with that lovely grin of his and his fine tenor voice.

  “Yes, Isabel, but you know, don’t you? You know that I don’t love him. I just don’t.”

  There was no answer to that, and the conversation had ended in silence.

  SHE FETCHED HER COAT, calling out to Grace that she was going out and would not be back for lunch. She was not sure whether Grace heard—there was the whine of a vacuum cleaner from somewhere within the house—and she called out again. This time the vacuum cleaner was switched off and there was a response.

  “Don’t make lunch,” Isabel called. “I’m not very hungry.”

  Cat was busy when Isabel arrived at the delicatessen. There were several customers in the shop, two busying themselves with the choice of a bottle of wine, pointing at labels and discussing the merits of Brunello over Chianti, while Cat was allowing another to sample a sliver of cheese from a large block of pecorino on a marble slab. She caught Isabel’s eye and smiled, mouthing a greeting. Isabel pointed to one of the tables at which Cat served her customers coffee; she would wait there until the customers had left.

  There were continental newspapers and magazines neatly stacked beside the table and she picked up a two-day-old copy of Corriere della Sera. She read Italian, as did Cat, and skipping the pages devoted to Italian politics—which she found impenetrable—she turned to the arts pages. There was a lengthy reevaluation of Calvino and a short article on the forthcoming season at La Scala. She decided that neither interested her: she knew none of the singers referred to in the headline to the La Scala article, and Calvino, in her view, needed no reassessment. That left a piece on an Albanian filmmaker who had become established in Rome and who was attempting to make films about his native country. It turned out to be a thoughtful read: there had been no cameras in Hoxha’s Albania, apparently—only those owned by the security police for the purpose of photographing suspects. It was not until he was thirty, the director revealed, that he had managed to get his hands on any photographic apparatus. I was trembling, he said. I thought I might drop it.

  Isabel finished the article and put down the newspaper. Poor man. All those years which had been wasted. Whole lifetimes had been spent in oppression and the denial of opportunities. Even if people knew, or suspected, that it would come to an end, many must have imagined that it would be too late for them. Would it help to know that one’s children might have what one was not allowed to taste for oneself? She looked at Cat. Cat, who was twenty-four, had never really known what it was like when half the world—or so it seemed—had been unable to talk to the other half. She had been a young girl when the Berlin Wall came down, and Stalin, and Hitler, and all the other tyrants were distant historical figures to her, almost as remote as the Borgias. Who were her bogeymen? she wondered. Who, if anyone, would really terrify her generation? A few days earlier she had heard somebody on the radio say that children should be taught that there are no evil people and that evil was just that which people did. The observation had arrested her: she was standing in the kitchen when she heard it, and she stopped exactly where she stood, and watched the leaves of a tree move against the sky outside. There are no evil people. Had he actually said that? There were always people who were prepared to say that sort of thing, just to show that they were not old-fashioned. Well, she suspected that one would not hear such a comment from this man from Albania, who had lived with evil about him like the four walls of a prison.

  She found herself gazing at the label of a bottle of olive oil which Cat had placed in a prominent position on a shelf near the table. It was painted in that nineteenth-century rural style which the Italians use to demonstrate the integrity of agricultural products. This was not from a factory, the illustration proclaimed; this was from a real farm, where women like those shown on the bottle pressed the oil from their own olives, where there were large, sweet-smelling white oxen and, in the background, a moustachioed farmer with a hoe. These were decent people, who believed in evil, and in the Virgin, and in a whole bevy of saints. But of course they did not exist anymore, and the olive oil probably came from North Africa and was rebottled by cynical Neapolitan businessmen who only paid lip service to the Virgin, when their mothers were within earshot.

  “You’re thinking,” said Cat, lowering herself into the other chair. “I can always tell when you’re thinking profound thoughts. You look dreamy.”

  Isabel smiled. “I was thinking about Italy, and evil, and topics of that nature.”

  Cat wiped her hands on a cloth. “I was thinking of cheese,” she said. “That woman sampled eight Italian cheeses and then bought a small block of farmhouse cheddar.”

  “Simple tastes,” said Isabel. “You mustn’t blame her.”

  “I’ve decided that I’m not too keen on the public,” said Cat. “I’d like to have a private shop. People would have to apply for membership before they could come in. I’d have to approve them. Rather like the members of your philosophy club or whatever it is.”

  “The Sunday Philosophy Club is not exactly very active,” she said to Cat. “But we’ll have a meeting one of these days.”

  “It’s such a good idea,” said C
at. “I’d come, but Sunday’s a bad day for me. I can never get myself organised to do anything. You know how it is. You know, don’t you?”

  Isabel did know. This, presumably, was what afflicted the members of the club.

  Cat looked at her. “Is everything all right? You look a bit low. I can always tell, you know.”

  Isabel was silent for a moment. She looked down at the pattern on the tablecloth, and then looked back up at her niece. “No. I suppose I’m not feeling all that cheerful. Something happened last night. I saw something terrible.”

  Cat frowned, and reached across the table to place a hand on Isabel’s arm. “What happened?”

  “Have you seen the paper this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see that item about the young man at the Usher Hall?”

  “Yes,” said Cat. “I did.”

  “I was there,” said Isabel simply. “I saw him fall from the gods, right past my eyes.”

  Cat gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must have been terrible.” She paused. “I know who it was, by the way. Somebody came in this morning and told me. I knew him, vaguely.”

  For a moment Isabel said nothing. She had expected no more than to tell Cat about what had happened; she had not imagined that she would know him, that poor, falling boy.

  “He lived near here,” Cat went on to explain. “In Marchmont. One of those flats right on the edge of the Meadows, I think. He came in here from time to time, but I really saw a bit more of his flatmates.”

  “Who was he?” Isabel asked.

  “Mark somebody or other,” Cat replied. “I was told his surname, but I can’t remember it. Somebody was in this morning—she knew them better—and she told me that it had happened. I was pretty shocked—like you.”