The Quiet Side of Passion Read online

  Isabel understood. “You feel a bit guilty about it? As if you’re taking pleasure in tittle-tattle?”

  “I suppose so.” He paused. “But you did ask, didn’t you?”

  She explained herself. “I’ve been reading about gossip. There’s a book about vices that we’re going to review. It has a chapter on gossip—how it’s a form of social grooming—glue to hold groups together. Gossip also plays a big part in friendships, we’re told.”

  “Some of it might,” said Jamie. “Innocent gossip, perhaps. That’s all about who’s been doing what. Who’s going out with whom. That sort of thing.” He wondered about the book. “What are the other vices?”

  “There’s an interesting discussion of snobbery.”

  “Which everyone agrees is a vice,” said Jamie.

  “Of course. But, come to think of it, what exactly is snobbery?”

  Jamie put down Julia Child again. It was difficult to plan a recipe at the same time as talking about the sorts of issues that Isabel chose to discuss.

  “I suppose it’s treating somebody as inferior,” he said. “Looking down on people. Or looking down on things too. Musical snobbery’s alive and well.”

  “So what do you think?” asked Isabel. “I mean you, personally? You bring up musical snobbery: What do you think of a teenager who knows four guitar chords and calls himself a musician?”

  Jamie laughed. “There are plenty of those. Some would-be guitarists know only three.”

  “And what do you think of them?”

  “They’re harmless enough,” said Jamie.

  Isabel pressed the point. “But what about somebody who said of such a person’s music, ‘It’s worthless rubbish’?”

  Jamie grinned. “I’d say they had it about right.”

  “And that’s not being snobbish?”

  He shook his head. “No, because it is worthless rubbish. Speaking the truth is not being snobbish—not at all.”

  “And what about somebody who’s crude and vulgar? Let’s say a man who makes derogatory, insulting remarks about women. Would you look down on somebody like that?”

  Jamie was not sure about looking down. “I wouldn’t actually look down on him—but I’d not think much of him.” He frowned. “There is a difference, I think.”

  “And that’s not being snobbish?” asked Isabel.

  Jamie felt more confident now. Being philosophical, he decided, was not as hard as it sounded; all that it required was clarity...and common sense. “No, not really. After all, we have to disapprove sometimes or we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between those who are...well, frankly, bad and those who aren’t. We wouldn’t be able to distinguish between Attila the Hun, and people like that, and...Saint Francis of Assisi.”

  Isabel smiled. “Who exactly was Attila the Hun?” she asked.

  Jamie looked puzzled. “He was...well, he was this...well, I suppose he was some sort of Hun—whoever they were. I think he was into rape and pillage.”

  “In a big way?”

  Jamie nodded. “Oh, a very big way. That’s why he’s become a sort of gold standard for dreadfulness.”

  “Along with Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan?”

  Isabel thought for a moment. She realised that she herself knew very little about Attila. What were his dates? Fourth century? Fifth? Was there anything to be said in his favour? Sometimes tyrants introduced enlightened codes of law or encouraged the arts, or even built enduring buildings. Might Attila complain, “Nobody seems to remember the sonnets I wrote?” She recalled that famous crossword clue—her favourite, in fact—the anagram used by Auden in one of his poems: He conquers all, a nubile tram. A nubile tram: absurdity was the quiddity by which an anagram was identified—though one should never judge people by their anagrams, the letters of Isabel Dalhousie themselves resolving unflatteringly into hideous bile alas. A nubile tram was obviously Tamburlaine, an emperor who, after all, numbered intellectual pursuits amongst his interests—along with wide-scale conquest, of course.

  Jamie sighed. “I really must concentrate on dinner—if you want to eat this evening.”

  “Of course,” said Isabel. “Chicken Tamburlaine. That sounds quite credible, doesn’t it? Omelette Genghis.”

  “I think I’ll stick to Julia,” said Jamie.

  That night, as she waited to drop off to sleep, Isabel thought about Patricia and the boy with freckles. She saw them alone in a small flat, sparsely furnished, a bit chilly perhaps, waiting for their life to become better. Jamie’s words came back to her: This child we welcome today is Basil Phelps. Suddenly she wanted to do something for Basil Phelps. But she was not sure what it could be, nor why she felt she had to do it. Basil Phelps, she whispered drowsily; and Jamie, asleep before her, stirred slightly in his sleep, his head upon the pillow, his hair slightly curled, as if painted by Raphael.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ISABEL SPENT the following morning editing. She had been released from childcare by Grace, whose job had changed since the birth of Magnus. Prior to that, she had still considered herself a housekeeper who occasionally helped out with Charlie. When Magnus arrived, though, she did less and less house cleaning and had correspondingly more to do with the baby. Nothing was said formally, but Isabel had recognised the shift in roles by increasing Grace’s salary. This was generous enough; Grace had been employed by Isabel’s father and Isabel accepted the duty incumbent on her to look after a family retainer. She did not really need a housekeeper, and would not have chosen to find one had Grace not simply come with the house, so to speak; but Grace was there, and expected to be kept on. Isabel did not argue, and now, with Magnus to cope with, she was relieved to have her. Isabel’s job—editing the Review of Applied Ethics—was really a full-time one; she needed support in the house. Grace loved children and was only too happy to oblige, but it did mean that the house had become progressively untidier and, in its remoter and less accessible corners, more in need of cleaning. Jamie agreed: a cleaner would need to be employed; willing as he was to do his share of the household tasks, he was too busy with his career—playing the bassoon and teaching it too—to be able to spend much time wielding the vacuum cleaner.

  The printer’s deadline for the next issue of the Review of Applied Ethics was fast approaching and something had gone awry with the footnotes in one of the articles. This could be remedied by comparing the copy-edited version with the author’s original—a straightforward enough process normally, but now made more complicated by the fact that the original file appeared to have been corrupted. Electronics made editorial work a great deal easier in some respects, but in others it had introduced new ways for things to go wrong. The old certainties of typescript, of pen and ink, of queries pencilled in along the margins, had been replaced by computer files that usually worked but could be subverted by a tired user pressing the wrong key late at night. Hours of effort might be hidden or even deleted by such a mistake, and not every program had the forgiveness necessary to allow one to undo what had been done.

  The forgiveness of machines, thought Isabel, and the phrase triggered an idea. There had been plenty of discussion amongst philosophers of the ethics of robotics—about how we treated robots, and they us. Human-like robots were already with us, and could be abused and mistreated—or loved. But did it matter what people did to them? Could one be cruel to a machine, even one as clever and as life-like as a robot? Or were human–robot relationships an entirely private matter, beyond any moral evaluation? Nasty people would be nasty to their robots, and nice people would be nice to them. Nothing changes.

  Isabel’s Review had already ventured into that territory with several articles. There had been “My Lover, My Robot,” by an Australian professor of machine intelligence, who felt that what went on between a robot and a human behind closed doors was no business of anybody else. That had drawn a response in the shape of a paper entitled “As You Ar
e to a Robot, So You Are to Persons,” by a firm Kantian from the Free University of Berlin. “Killing a robot of human appearance makes a person a killer in his heart,” wrote this author. “Such an act—along with any other act of contempt for the robot—discloses a mindset of contempt for humanity in general. If you can plunge a knife into the breast of what looks and acts like a human, then might you not do the same with a real, living and breathing being? Morally speaking, you are just as vicious in your attitude.” But were you? Isabel had disagreed with this—she thought that there was a real distinction, based on actual harm, but she understood the author’s point of view and she was glad, after all, that such morally scrupulous people existed. It was the same with fiction: the suffering of people in books was not real suffering, but the tears we might shed for them were real enough, and that said something about the ethics of fiction. An author who subjected a fictional character to cruel treatment, and then showed no sympathy, would soon incur the disapproval of readers.

  There had been no discussion yet—in the Review, at least—of the issue of how robots might treat us: the reverse side of the coin. A special issue of the Review could be dedicated to the question of whether robots would be capable of understanding human limitations, of showing mercy, of bending rules that seemed too harsh for the circumstances. She thought they would not; already there was a big difference between a computer and a clerk. Human clerks forgave, might understand a spelling error, might work out what you meant; computers tended not to do that, and what were robots if not computers with arms and legs? There were no excuses in the robotic world—only algorithms.

  It took her several hours to deal with the problem of the corrupted footnotes. By the time she had finished, Grace was at the door asking whether she should collect Charlie from nursery school.

  “You look far too busy,” said Grace, pointing to the papers on Isabel’s desk. “Why don’t I go?”

  Isabel thanked her, but explained that she had finished and was looking forward to the walk around the corner to the nursery. There was another reason too; the story Jamie had told her the previous evening had intrigued her as much as it had shocked her, and she wanted to take a closer look at Basil Phelps and his mother, Patricia.

  She set off early, although the nursery school was only a block away. Parents often arrived ten minutes or so before the end of the school day and would chat to one another before the doors opened and the children streamed out. It was the equivalent of the old parish pump, thought Isabel: people had traditionally exchanged news and views while drawing water for their households. All the business of a village could be transacted at the parish pump: feuds mended, understandings reached, marriages arranged—there was nothing that could not be transacted by neighbours. The parish pump, she reflected, was also the way typhoid and cholera spread.

  There were two fathers already there when she arrived. Isabel knew both of them slightly, but did not interrupt their conversation. Instead, she parked herself on a bench the nursery had provided for waiting parents and from there surveyed the small front garden created by the owners of the nursery. The children had decorated this with coloured stones they had painted themselves—these were bright red and yellow against the surrounding greenery.

  Her eyes were half closed. The warm weather had continued and the air was languid and unmoving, making it a day for doing exactly what she was doing—sitting on a bench, looking at the world, allowing time to slip through her fingers. From the corner of her eye, she became aware that two other people had arrived at the same time: a woman who was the mother of one of Charlie’s particular friends at nursery—a rather discouraged-looking woman whose second child was in the pushchair she brought with her—and Patricia.

  Isabel looked up. Patricia had not come into the garden, but was standing just outside the gate. The two fathers standing nearby had nodded a greeting to her but were continuing with their private discussion; one was demonstrating something with his hands—an exaggerated chopping motion, as if he were talking about an obscure martial art.

  Isabel rose from the bench and made her way over to join Patricia.

  “You’re Basil’s mother, aren’t you?”

  Patricia turned round and smiled. “Yes, I am. And you’re...”

  “Charlie’s.”

  “Of course. Basil said something about Charlie the other day. I think they’ve played together.”

  Isabel shot a discreet glance at Patricia. She was an attractive woman, rather tall, with the hairstyle that Jamie had mentioned. Isabel recognised her colouring as what she thought of as typically Irish: the pale, almost translucent skin, the green-grey eyes. Isabel found herself thinking of a phrase from Homer’s Odyssey—Athena, in her many forms, was always described as the grey-eyed goddess. This was Athena. And Homer’s sea was the wine-dark sea; the wine-dark sea.

  Behind them, the doors opened and the children emerged. There were squeals and there was chatter. Isabel saw Charlie holding something that he’d obviously made—a papier-mâché object painted, like the stones in the garden, in vivid primary colours. One could never guess what such creations were—in much the same way that one could never guess what some contemporary sculpture represented. (“Nothing,” a sculptor might say; “that’s the whole point. It’s not representational at all.”)

  She saw the little boy with freckles. He ran towards his mother and wrapped his arms around her legs. Patricia looked up, caught Isabel’s eye and smiled. On impulse, Isabel said, “I live just round the corner—would you like to drop in for a cup of tea? The boys could play.”

  Charlie was now thrusting his artistic efforts at her, and she did not hear Patricia’s reply.

  “Sorry,” said Isabel. “I was distracted.”

  “I said thank you—I’d love to.” She reached into a pocket of the lightweight jacket she was wearing. “I’ll just have to make a quick call.”

  Isabel had not intended to invite her there and then; it had been an invitation to drop in some time, although she had not said that. It was too late now to explain that she had been planning to finish her editing. That would have to wait.

  Patricia spoke briefly into her phone. “Something’s cropped up,” she muttered to the caller. “Phone me later, if you don’t mind.”

  “We could make it some other time,” offered Isabel. “Any time, really.”

  “No, that’s fine,” said Patricia, reaching for Basil’s hand. “Come on, sweetie, you’re going to play at Charlie’s house.”

  Basil struggled to escape.

  “It’ll be fun,” said Isabel, leaning down to smile at Basil. “Charlie has lots of toys.”

  Basil looked at her suspiciously. She noticed how freckled he was—like a scone dotted with light raisins, she thought. A spotted child.

  “Come on, Basil darling,” said Patricia, taking hold of the child’s hand once more. She shot Isabel an apologetic glance.

  “Oh, I know all about resistance,” said Isabel. “We had a little episode the other day...” She glanced to see if Charlie was listening, but he was busy struggling to do up the catch on his lunch box. “We went to the doctor and...” She looked again at Charlie. “And we kicked him, I’m afraid. I felt so embarrassed.”

  Patricia laughed. “Basil bit the dentist. It was at his first check-up, and he sank his teeth into the dentist’s fingers. She had to prise his jaws apart to get them out. She was so good about it.”

  “I suppose that’s an occupational risk for dentists,” said Isabel. “Charlie occasionally bites. Not often, but now and then he’ll give you a little nip.”

  The children gathered up, they began to walk back towards Isabel’s house, barely five minutes away. Isabel noticed that Patricia was looking at the houses as they passed, and she felt a momentary embarrassment. These were well-set Victorian villas, tucked away in gardens, surrounded by trees. Everything about them was expensive, eve
n if there was nothing ostentatious in their appearance. Discretion reigned here; there was no flaunting of wealth, and yet to live here was out of reach of most; a house in Isabel’s street would cost as much as several flats put together. She winced at the thought. Her instincts were egalitarian—as the instincts of most Scots were—but the facts of her situation were inescapable: she had more than others—considerably more.

  “I’ve walked down this street before,” said Patricia. “I love leafy places like this.”

  The trees, thought Isabel—the trees at least are free. “I was brought up here,” she said, as if in explanation; why, she thought, should one apologise for where life placed you? “It was my parents’ house.”

  She wondered why that should make a difference. If you lived in a house your parents lived in, then you would not have had to buy it. But the house itself represented inherited wealth, and in some eyes, that was somehow tainted.

  “You’re lucky,” said Patricia.

  That was precisely it, thought Isabel. Luck. It was luck that her mother—her “sainted American mother,” as she called her—had happened to have inherited an interest in the Louisiana Land Company, and that this had filtered down to Isabel. That was pure luck, as was all inheritance, genetic or financial. You were lucky if you had regular features, or a dimple in the right place, or a fine brow. That was just the result of a particular pattern of repeats in a sequence of DNA, an instruction somewhere in that long code that made you what you were. There were only four letters in the code, yet the order in which they followed one another determined everything, or just about everything. There was still a small role for individual effort, but even then you could argue that people would only make an effort to change their fate if their DNA endowed them with the ability to do so.

  She looked down at Basil, walking hesitantly beside Charlie, who was eyeing him up as a possible friend. She saw the freckles. Somewhere in the little boy’s DNA there was an instruction—added, perhaps, as an afterthought: oh, and on the skin there will be little blotches of pigment (appealing; ginger), just a fraction of an inch apart—but just on the face and perhaps the shoulders. What accident lay behind such a precise chemical instruction, unless, of course, there lay an intelligence...That was another matter—not one to be thought about as she walked down the street with a stranger she had only a few minutes ago inadvertently invited to tea.