The Sunday Philosophy Club (2 page)

From where he had been crouching, Jennifer’s husband straightened up. “What was that?” he called to them. “What happened?”

“Somebody fell,” said Jennifer. She pointed at the upper circle, at the point where the top layer joined the wall. “From up there. He fell.”

They looked at one another again. Now Isabel moved forward to the edge of the circle. There was a brass rail running along the parapet, and she held on to this as she peered over.

Below her, slumped over the edge of a seat, his legs twisted over the arms of the neighbouring seats, one foot, she noticed, without a shoe, but stockinged, was the young man. She could not see his head, which was down below the level of the seat; but she saw an arm sticking up, as if reaching for something, but quite still. Beside him stood two men in evening dress, one of whom had reached forward and was touching him, while the other looked back towards the door.

“Quickly!” one of the men shouted. “Hurry!”

A woman called out something and a third man ran up the aisle to where the young man lay. He bent down and then began to lift the young man off the seat. Now the head came into view, and lolled, as if loosened from the body. Isabel withdrew and looked at Jennifer.

“We’ll have to go down there,” she said. “We saw what happened. We had better go and tell somebody what we saw.”

Jennifer nodded. “We didn’t see much,” she said. “It was over so quickly. Oh dear.”

Isabel saw that her friend was shaking, and she put an arm about her shoulder. “That was ghastly!” she said. “Such a shock.”

Jennifer closed her eyes. “He just came down … so quickly. Do you think he’s still alive? Did you see?”

“I’m afraid he looked rather badly hurt,” said Isabel, thinking, It’s worse than that.

THEY WENT DOWNSTAIRS.
A small crowd of people had gathered round the door into the stalls, and there was a buzz of conversation. As Isabel and Jennifer drew near, a woman turned to them and said: “Somebody fell from the gods. He’s in there.”

Isabel nodded. “We saw it happen,” she said. “We were up there.”

“You saw it?” said the woman. “You actually saw it?”

“We saw him coming down,” said Jennifer. “We were in the grand circle. He came down past us.”

“How dreadful,” said the woman. “To see it…”

“Yes.”

The woman looked at Isabel with that sudden human intimacy that the witnessing of tragedy permitted.

“I don’t know if we should be standing here,” Isabel muttered, half to Jennifer, half to the other woman. “We’ll just get in the way.”

The other woman drew back. “One wants to do something,” she said lamely.

“I do hope that he’s all right,” said Jennifer. “Falling all that way. He hit the edge of the circle, you know. It might have broken the fall a bit.”

No, thought Isabel, it would have made it worse, perhaps; there would be two sets of injuries, the blow from the edge of the circle and injuries on the ground. She looked behind her; there
was activity at the front door and then, against the wall, the flashing blue light of the ambulance outside.

“We must let them get through,” said Jennifer, moving away from the knot of people at the door. “The ambulance men will need to get in.”

They stood back as two men in loose green fatigues hurried past, carrying a folded stretcher. They were not long in coming out—less than a minute, it seemed—and then they went past, the young man laid out on the stretcher, his arms folded over his chest. Isabel turned away, anxious not to intrude, but she saw his face before she averted her gaze. She saw the halo of tousled dark hair and the fine features, undamaged. To be so beautiful, she thought, and now the end. She closed her eyes. She felt raw inside, empty. This poor young man, loved by somebody somewhere, whose world would end this evening, she thought, when the cruel news was broached. All that love invested in a future that would not materialise, ended in a second, in a fall from the gods.

She turned to Jennifer. “I’m going upstairs quickly,” she said, her voice lowered. “Tell them that we saw it. Tell them I’ll be back in a moment.”

Jennifer nodded, looking about her to see who was in charge. There was confusion now. A woman was sobbing, one of the women who must have been standing in the stalls when he came down, and she was being comforted by a tall man in an evening jacket.

Isabel detached herself and made her way to one of the staircases that led up to the gods. She felt uneasy, and glanced behind her, but there was nobody around. She climbed up the last few stairs, through one of the archways that led to the steeply racked
seating. It was quiet, and the lights suspended from the ceiling above were dimmed in their ornate glass bowls. She looked down, to the edge over which the boy had fallen. They had been standing almost immediately below the point at which he had dropped, which enabled her to calculate where he must have been standing before he slipped.

She made her way down to the parapet and edged along the front row of seats. Here was the brass rail over which he must have been leaning before, and there, down on the ground, a programme. She bent down and picked it up; its cover, she noticed, had a slight tear, but that was all. She replaced it where she had found it. Then she bent over and looked down over the edge. He must have been sitting here, at the very end of the row, where the upper circle met the wall. Had he been further in towards the middle, he would have landed in the grand circle; only at the end of the row was there a clear drop down to the stalls.

For a moment she felt a swaying vertigo, and she closed her eyes. But then she opened them again and looked down into the stalls, a good fifty feet below. Beneath her, standing near to where the young man had landed, a man in a blue windcheater looked upwards and into her eyes. They were both surprised, and Isabel leant backwards, as if warned off by his stare.

Isabel left the edge and made her way back up the aisle between the seats. She had no idea what she had expected to find—if anything—and she felt embarrassed to have been seen by that man below. What must he have thought of her? A vulgar onlooker trying to imagine what that poor boy must have seen during his last seconds on this earth, no doubt. But that was not what she had been doing; not at all.

She reached the stairs and began to walk down, holding the
rail as she did so. The steps were stone, and spiral, and one might so easily slip. As he must have done, she thought. He must have looked over, perhaps to see if he could spot somebody down below, a friend maybe, and then he had lost his footing and toppled over. It could easily happen—the parapet was low enough.

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.

A
T 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.