The Sunday Philosophy Club id-1 Read online

  Cat was watching her. “You should give him a chance,” she said quietly. “He’s a nice person. He really is.”

  “Of course he is,” said Isabel quickly. “Of course he is. I’ve got nothing against Toby.”

  Cat smiled. “You’re very unconvincing when you’re telling lies,” she said. “It’s quite apparent you don’t like him. You can’t help showing it.”

  Isabel felt trapped, and thought: I’m an unconvincing hypocrite. There was silence now at the table of students, and she was aware of the fact that they were listening to the conversation.

  She stared at them, noticing that one of the boys had a small pin in his ear. People who had metal piercing in their heads were asking for trouble, Grace had once said. Isabel had asked why this should be so. Hadn’t people always worn earrings, and got away with it? Grace had replied that metal piercings attracted light-ning, and that she had read of a heavily pierced man who had been struck dead in an electric storm while those around him, unpierced, had survived.

  The students exchanged glances, and Isabel turned away. “This is not the place to discuss it, Cat,” she said, her voice lowered.

  T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

  6 7

  “Maybe not. But it does upset me. I only want you to try with him. Try to get beyond your initial reaction.”

  “My initial reaction was not entirely negative,” whispered Isabel. “I may not have felt particularly warm towards him, but that’s just because he’s not really my type. That’s all.”

  “Why isn’t he your type?” asked Cat defensively, her voice raised. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Isabel glanced at the students, who were now smiling. She deserved to be eavesdropped upon, she reflected; your acts will be returned to you, faithfully, every one.

  “I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with him,” she began.

  “It’s just that, are you sure that he’s quite . . . quite your intellectual equal? That can matter a lot, you know.”

  Cat frowned, and Isabel wondered whether she had gone too far. “He’s not stupid,” Cat said indignantly. “He has a degree from St. Andrews, remember. And he’s seen a bit of the world.”

  St. Andrews! Isabel was just about to say, “Well, there you are: St. Andrews,” but thought better of it. St. Andrews had a reputation of attracting well-off young people who came from the upper echelons of society and who wanted to find somewhere congenial to spend a few years while they attended parties. The Americans called such places party schools. In this case, it was an unfair reputation, as many reputations were, but there was at least a mod-icum of truth in it. Toby would have fitted very well into that social vision of St. Andrews, but it would have been unkind to point that out, and, anyway, now she wanted the conversation to stop. It had not been her intention to become embroiled in an argument about Toby; she did not think it right to interfere, and she must stop herself from drifting into a confrontation with Cat. This would make it more awkward in the future. Besides, he would go off with somebody else before too long and that would be that. Unless—

  6 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and here was another appalling thought—unless Toby was interested in Cat for her money.

  Isabel tended not to think a great deal about money, a position of privilege, as she well recognised. She and her brother had each inherited from their mother a half share in the Louisiana and Gulf Land Company, and this had left them wealthy by any standards. Isabel was discreet about this, and used her money carefully in respect of herself and generously in respect of others.

  But the good that she did was done by stealth.

  On Cat’s twenty-first birthday Isabel’s brother had trans-ferred enough to his daughter to allow her to buy a flat and, later, the delicatessen. There was not much left over from that—a wise policy on his part, thought Isabel—but Cat was extremely well off by the standards of her age group, most of whom would be struggling to save the deposit on a flat. Edinburgh was expensive, and thus was out of reach for many.

  Toby, of course, came from a well-off background, but his family’s money was probably tied up in the business and he was likely not paid much of a salary by his father. Such young men knew exactly how important money was, and they had a talent for sniffing it out. That meant that he might be very interested in the assets which Cat had at her disposal, although Isabel could never make such a suggestion openly. If only she could find some evidence of it, and prove it, as in the denouement of some dreadful drawing-room melodrama, but that would be highly unlikely.

  She reached across to reassure Cat as she changed the subject.

  “He’s perfectly all right,” she said. “I’ll make an effort, and I’m sure that I’ll see his good points. It’s my fault for being too . . . too fixed in my views. I’m sorry.”

  Cat appeared mollified, and Isabel steered the conversation to an account of her meeting with Paul Hogg. She had decided, T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

  6 9

  on her way to the bistro, what she would do about that, and now she explained it to Cat.

  “I’ve tried to forget what I saw,” she explained. “It hasn’t worked. I still think about it, and then that conversation I had with Paul Hogg last night really disturbed me. Something odd happened that night at the Usher Hall. I don’t think that it was an accident. I really don’t.”

  Cat was looked at her dubiously. “I hope you aren’t going to get involved,” she said. “You’ve done this before. You’ve got involved in things that are really none of your business. I really don’t think you should do that again.”

  Cat was aware of the fact that there was no point in upbraid-ing Isabel: she would never change. There was no reason why she should become involved in the affairs of others, but she seemed to be irresistibly drawn into them. And every time that she did it, it was because she imagined that there was a moral claim on her.

  This view of the world, with a seemingly endless supply of potential claims, meant that anybody with a problem could arrive on Isabel’s doorstep and be taken up, simply because the require-ment of moral proximity—or her understanding of moral proximity—had been satisfied.

  They had argued about Isabel’s inability to say no, which in Cat’s view was the root of the problem. “You simply can’t get drawn into other people’s business like this,” she had protested after Isabel had become involved in sorting out the problems of a hotel-owning family that was fighting over what to do with their business. But Isabel, who had regularly been taken for Sunday lunch in the hotel as a child, had considered that this gave her an interest in what happened to it and had become sucked into an unpleasant boardroom battle.

  Cat had voiced the same concerns when it came to the unfor-7 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tunate young man in the Usher Hall. “But this is my business,”

  said Isabel. “I saw the whole thing—or most of it. I was the last person that young man saw. The last person. And don’t you think that the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”

  “I’m not with you,” said Cat. “I don’t see what you mean.”

  Isabel leant back in her chair. “What I mean is this. We can’t have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbours, people we deal with, and so on.”

  Who, then, is our neighbour? she would say to the Sunday Philosophy Club. And the members of the Sunday Philosophy Club would think very carefully about this and come to the conclusion, Isabel suspected, that the only real standard we can find for this is the concept of proximity. Our moral neighbours are those who are close to us, spatially or in some other recognised sense. Distant claims are simply not as powerful as those we can see before us. These close claims are more vivid and therefore more real.

  “Reasonable enough,” said Cat. “But you didn’t come into co
ntact with him in that sense. He just . . . sorry to say this . . .

  he just passed by.”

  “He must have seen me,” said Isabel. “And I saw him—in a state of extreme vulnerability. I’m sorry to sound the philosopher, but in my view that creates a moral bond between us. We were not moral strangers.”

  “You sound like the Review of Applied Ethics, ” said Cat dryly.

  “I am the Review of Applied Ethics, ” Isabel replied.

  The remark made them both laugh, and the tension that had been growing dissipated.

  “Well,” said Cat, “there’s obviously nothing that I can do to T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

  7 1

  stop you doing whatever it is you want to do. I may as well help you. What do you need?”

  “The address of his flatmates,” said Isabel. “That’s all.”

  “You want to speak to them?”

  “Yes.”

  Cat shrugged. “I can’t imagine that you’ll find out much.

  They weren’t there. How will they know what happened?”

  “I want some background,” said Isabel. “Information about him.”

  “All right,” said Cat. “I’ll find this out for you. It won’t be hard.”

  As she walked home after her lunch with Cat, Isabel thought about their discussion. Cat had been right to ask her about why she involved herself in these matters; it was a question she should have asked herself more often, but did not. Of course, it was simple to work out why we had a moral obligation to others, but that was really not the point. The question which she had to address was what drove her to respond as she did. And one reason for that, if she were honest with herself, might be that she simply found it intellectually exciting to become involved. She wanted to know why things happened. She wanted to know why people did the things they did. She was curious. And what, she wondered, was wrong with that?

  Curiosity killed the cat, she suddenly thought, and immediately regretted the thought. Cat was everything to her, really; the child she had never had, her parlous immortality.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  E

  ISABEL HAD EXPECTED to spend the evening alone. Her progress with the index had encouraged her to tackle another task which she had been putting off—detailed work on an article which had returned from a reviewer accompanied by a lengthy set of comments and corrections. These had been scribbled in the margins and needed to be collated, a task which was rendered all the more difficult by the reviewer’s irritating abbrevia-tions and spidery handwriting. That was the last time he would be used, she had decided—eminent or not.

  But Jamie arrived instead, ringing her bell shortly before six.

  She welcomed him warmly, and immediately invited him to stay for dinner, if he had nothing else planned, of course. She knew that he would accept, and he did, after a momentary hesitation for form’s sake. And for the sake of pride: Jamie was Cat’s age, twenty-four, and it was a Friday evening. Everybody else would have something planned for that evening, and he would not want Isabel to think that he had no social life.

  “Well,” he said, “I was thinking of meeting up with somebody, but since you ask . . . Why not?”

  T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

  7 3

  Isabel smiled. “It will be potluck, as usual, but I know you’re not fussy.”

  Jamie took off his jacket and left it with his bag in the hall.

  “I’ve brought some music with me,” he said. “I thought you might like to accompany me. Later on, that is.”

  Isabel nodded. She played the piano moderately well and could usually just manage to keep up with Jamie, who was a tenor.

  He had a trained voice and sang with a well-known chorus, which was another attribute, she thought, which Cat could have taken into consideration. She had no idea whether Toby could sing, but would be surprised if he could. He would also be unlikely to play a musical instrument (except the bagpipes, perhaps, or, at a stretch, percussion), whereas Jamie played the bassoon. Cat had a good ear for music and was a reasonable pianist as well. In that brief period when she and Jamie had been together, she had accompanied him brilliantly, and she had brought him out of himself as a performer. They sounded so natural together, Isabel had thought. If only Cat would realise! If only she would see what she was giving up. But of course Isabel understood that there was no objectivity when it came to these matters. There were two tests: the best interests test and the personal chemistry test. Jamie was in Cat’s best interests—Isabel was convinced of that—but personal chemistry was another matter.

  Isabel shot a glance at her guest. Cat must have been sufficiently attracted to him in the first place, and she could see why, looking at him now. Cat liked tall men, and Jamie was as tall as Toby, perhaps even slightly taller. He was undoubtedly good-looking: high cheekbones, dark hair that he tended to have cut en brosse, and skin with a natural tan. He could have been Portuguese—almost—or Italian, perhaps, although he was Scottish 7 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h on both sides. What more could Cat want? she thought. Really!

  What else could a girl possibly require than a Scotsman who looked Mediterranean and could sing?

  The answer came to her unbidden, like an awkward truth that nudges one at the wrong moment. Jamie was too nice. He had given Cat his whole attention—had fawned on her, perhaps—and she had grown tired of that. We do not like those who are completely available, who make themselves over to us entirely. They crowd us out. They make us feel uneasy.

  That was it. If Jamie had maintained some distance, a degree of remoteness, then that would have attracted Cat’s interest.

  That was why she seemed so happy now. She could not possess Toby, who would always seem slightly remote, as if he were excluding her from some part of his plans (which he was, Isabel had convinced herself). It was wrong to think of men as the pred-ators: women had exactly the same inclinations, although often more discreetly revealed. Toby was suitable prey. Jamie, by making it quite apparent that Cat had his complete and unfettered attention, had ceased to interest her. It was a bleak conclusion.

  “You were too good to her,” she muttered.

  Jamie looked at her in puzzlement. “Too good?”

  Isabel smiled. “I was thinking aloud,” she said. “I was thinking that you were too good to Cat. That’s why it didn’t work out.

  You should have been more . . . more evasive. You should have let her down now and then. Looked at other girls.”

  Jamie said nothing. They had often discussed Cat—and he still nurtured the hope that Isabel would be his way back into Cat’s affections, or so Isabel thought. But this new view she was expressing was an unexpected one, no doubt. Why should he have let her down?

  T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

  7 5

  Isabel sighed. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t want to go over all that again.”

  Jamie raised his hands. “I don’t mind. I like talking about her.

  I want to talk about her.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Isabel. She paused. She wanted to say something to him that she had not said before, and was judging her moment. “You love her still, don’t you? You’re still in love.”

  Jamie looked down at the carpet, embarrassed.

  “Just like myself,” said Isabel quietly. “The two of us. I’m still a bit in love with somebody whom I knew a long time ago, years ago. And there you are, also in love with somebody who doesn’t seem to love you. What a pair we are, the two of us. Why do we bother?”

  Jamie was silent for a moment. Then he asked her, “What’s he called? Your . . . this man of yours.”

  “John Liamor,” she said.

  “And what happened to him?”

  “He left me,” Isabel said. “And now he lives in California.

  With another woman.”

  “That must be very hard for you,” said Jamie.

  “Yes, it
is very hard,” said Isabel. “But then it’s my own fault, isn’t it? I should have found somebody else instead of thinking about him all the time. And that’s what you should do, I suppose.”

  The advice was halfhearted; but as she gave it she realised it was exactly the right advice to give. If Jamie found somebody else, then Cat might show an interest in him once Toby was disposed of. Disposed of! That sounded so sinister, as if the two of them might arrange an accident. An avalanche, perhaps.

  “Could one start an avalanche?” she asked.

  Jamie’s eyes opened wide. “What an odd thing to ask,” he 7 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h said. “But of course you could. If the snow is in the right condition, then all you have to do is to shift a bit of it, tread on it, even, and the whole thing gets going. Sometimes you can start them just by talking in a loud voice. The vibrations of your voice can make the snow start to move.”

  Isabel smiled. She again imagined Toby on a mountainside, in his crushed-strawberry ski suit, talking loudly about wine. “Do you know I had the most wonderful bottle of Chablis the other day. Fabulous. Flinty, sharp . . .” There would be a pause, and the words “flinty, sharp” would echo across the snowfields, just enough to start the tidal wave of snow.

  She checked herself. That was the third time that she had imagined him in a disaster and she should stop. It was childish, uncharitable, and wrong. We have a duty to control our thoughts, she said to herself. We are responsible for our mental states, as she well knew from her reading in moral philosophy. The unbidden thought may arrive, and that was a matter of moral indifference, but we should not dwell on the harmful fantasy, because it was bad for our character, and besides, one might just translate fantasy into reality. It was a question of duty to self, in Kantian terms, and whatever she thought about Toby, he did not deserve an avalanche or to be reduced to biscuits. Nobody could be said to deserve that, not even the truly wicked, or a member of that other Nemesis-tempting class, the totally egotistical.