The Sunday Philosophy Club (10 page)

“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?

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
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.

And who were they, she wondered, these practitioners of hubris? She had a small mental list of those who might be warned, for their own protection, of how close they were to attracting the attentions of Nemesis—a list which was headed by a local social climber of breathtaking nerve. An avalanche might reduce his self-satisfaction, but that was unkind; he had his good
side, and such thoughts had to be put aside. They were unworthy of the editor of the
Review of Applied Ethics.

“Music before dinner,” said Isabel briskly. “What have you brought with you? Let me take a look.”

THEY MOVED THROUGH
to the music room, a small room at the back of the house, furnished with a restored Edwardian music stand and her mother’s baby grand piano. Jamie opened his music case and extracted a thin album of music, which he handed to Isabel for examination. She flicked through the pages and smiled. It was exactly the sort of music that he always chose, settings of Burns, arias from Gilbert and Sullivan, and, of course, “O mio babbino caro.”

“Just right for your voice,” Isabel said. “As usual.”

Jamie blushed. “I’m not much good at the newer stuff,” he said. “Remember that Britten? I couldn’t do it.”

Isabel was quick to reassure him. “I like these,” she said. “They’re much easier to play than Britten.”

She paged through the book again and made her choice.

“‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes’?”

“Just so,” said Jamie.

She began the introduction and Jamie, standing in his singing pose, head tilted slightly forward so as not to restrict the larynx, gave voice to the song. Isabel played with determination—which was the only way to play Gilbert and Sullivan, she thought—and they finished with a flourish that was not exactly in the music but that could have been there if Sullivan had bothered. Then it was Burns, and “John Anderson, My Jo.”

John Anderson, she thought. Yes. A reflection on the passage
of the years, and of love that survives.
But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo.
There was an ineffable sadness in this line that always made her catch her breath. This was Burns in his gentler mood, addressing a constancy that by all accounts, including his own, eluded him in his own relations with women. What a hypocrite! Or was he? Was there anything wrong with celebrating qualities one lacked oneself? Surely not. People who suffered from
akrasia
(which philosophers knew all about and enjoyed debating at great length) could still profess that it was better to do that which they themselves could not do. You can say that it is bad to overindulge in chocolate, or wine, or any of the other things in which people like to overindulge, and still overindulge yourself. The important thing, surely, is not to conceal your own overindulgence.

“John Anderson” was meant to be sung by a woman, but men could sing it if they wished. And in a way it was even more touching when sung by a man, as it could be about a male friendship too. Not that men liked to talk—still less to sing—about such things, which was something which had always puzzled Isabel. Women were so much more natural in their friendships, and in their acceptance of what their friendships meant to them. Men were so different: they kept their friends at arm’s length and never admitted their feelings for them. How
arid
it must be to be a man; how constrained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in the desert. And yet how many exceptions there were; how marvellous, for example, it must be to be Jamie, with that remarkable face of his, so full of feeling, like the face of one of those young men in Florentine Renaissance paintings.

“John Anderson,” said Isabel, as she played the last chord, and the music faded away. “I was thinking of you and John Anderson. Your friend John Anderson.”

“I never had one,” said Jamie. “I never had a friend like that.”

Isabel looked up from the music, and out the window. It was beginning to get dark, and the branches of the trees were silhouetted against a pale evening sky.

“Nobody? Not even as a boy? I thought boys had passionate friendships. David and Jonathan.”

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.”

T
HE 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.