The Sunday Philosophy Club (22 page)

Isabel thought the situation bleak, but she had to acknowledge that there was something in what Grace had said. “In the meantime she’s not going to forgive me, though.”

“Probably not,” said Grace, in a matter-of-fact way. “Although it might help if you wrote to her and told her how sorry you were. She’ll get round to forgiving you in due course, but it will be easier if you’ve left the door open.”

Isabel did as Grace suggested, and wrote a brief letter to Cat. She apologised for the distress she had caused her and hoped that Cat would forgive her. But even as she wrote,
Please forgive me,
she realised that only a few weeks before she herself had said to Cat,
There’s such a thing as premature forgiveness,
because a lot of nonsense was talked about forgiveness by those who simply did not grasp (or had never heard of) the point that Professor Strawson had made in
Freedom and Resentment
about reactive attitudes and how important these were—Peter Strawson, whose name, Isabel noted, could be rendered anagrammatically, and unfairly, as
a pen strews rot.
We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn’t matter. So we should not forgive prematurely, which is presumably what Pope John Paul II had in mind when he waited for all those years before he went to visit his attacker in his cell. Isabel wondered what the pope had said to the gunman. “I forgive you”? Or had he said something very different, something
not at all forgiving? She smiled at the thought; popes were human, after all, and behaved like human beings, which meant that they must look in the mirror from time to time and ask themselves: Is this really me in this slightly absurd outfit, waiting to go out onto the balcony and wave to all these people, with their flags, and their hopes, and their tears?

A HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPED
in a restaurant, after several glasses of Italian wine, and in the company of an attractive young man, was one thing; a hypothesis that could stand the cold light of day was another. Isabel was well aware of the fact that all she had in the case of Minty Auchterlonie was a conjecture. If it was true that there were irregularities in McDowell’s, and if it was true that Mark Fraser had stumbled upon them, then it did not necessarily mean that Paul Hogg was implicated. Isabel’s idea about how he could be implicated was feasible, she supposed, but no more than that. McDowell’s was a large firm, she understood, and there was no reason why Paul Hogg should be the one to whom Mark’s discovery related.

Isabel realised that if she wished to develop a firmer foundation for her hypothesis, indeed if she wished to make it remotely credible, then she would need to find out more about McDowell’s, and that would not be easy. She would need to talk to people in the financial world; they would know even if they did not work in McDowell’s itself. The Edinburgh financial community had all the characteristics of a village, as did the legal community, and there would be gossip. But she would need more than that: she would need to discover how one might be able to find out whether somebody had traded improperly on private information. Would this involve monitoring share transactions? How on earth
would one go about that, trying to glean information about who bought what in all the millions of transactions that take place on the stock exchanges every year? And of course people would be careful to cover their tracks through the use of nominees and offshore agents. If there were very few prosecutions for insider trading—and indeed hardly any convictions—this was for good reason. One simply could not prove it. And if that was the case, then anything that Minty did with the information she gathered from her fiancé would be impossible to track down. Minty could act with impunity, unless—and this was a major qualification—unless the somebody from within, somebody like Mark Fraser, could link her transactions with information which he knew Paul Hogg would have possessed. But Mark, of course, was dead. Which meant that she would have to go and see her friend Peter Stevenson, financier, discreet philanthropist, and chairman of the Really Terrible Orchestra.

W
EST GRANGE HOUSE
was a large square house, built in the late eighteenth century and painted white. It stood in large grounds in the Grange, a well-set suburb that rubbed shoulders with Morningside and Bruntsfield, an easy walk from Isabel’s house and an easier one from Cat’s delicatessen. Peter Stevenson had wanted the house for as long as he could remember and had leapt at the chance to buy it when it unexpectedly came on the market.

Peter had been a successful merchant banker and had decided in his mid-forties to pursue an independent career as a company doctor. Firms in financial trouble could call on him to attempt a rescue, or firms with bickering boards could invite him in to mediate their squabbles. In his quiet way he had brought peace to troubled business lives, persuading people to sit down and examine their issues one by one.

“Everything has a solution,” he observed to Isabel in answer to a question she put to him about his work as he showed her into his morning room. “Everything. All you have to do is to strip the problem down and then start from there. All one has to do is to make a list and be reasonable.”

“Which people often aren’t,” said Isabel.

Peter smiled. “You can work round that. Most people can become reasonable even if they aren’t in the beginning.”

“Except for some,” Isabel had persisted. “The profoundly unreasonable. And there are quite a few of those, quick and dead. Idi Amin and Pol Pot, to name two.”

Peter reflected on her turn of phrase. Who still spoke of the quick and the dead? Most people had lost that understanding of “quick” and would look blank if they heard it. How typical of Isabel to keep a word alive, like a gardener tending to a feeble plant. Good for Isabel.

“The irretrievably unreasonable tend not to run businesses,” he said, “even if they try to run countries. Politicians are different from businessmen or company people. Politics attracts quite the wrong sort of person.”

Isabel agreed. “Absolutely. All those overgrown egos. It’s why they go into politics in the first place. They want to dominate others. They enjoy power and its trappings. Few of them go into politics because they want to improve the world. Some might, I suppose, but not many.”

Peter thought for a moment. “Well, there are the Gandhis and the Mandelas, I suppose, and President Carter.”

“President Carter?”

Peter nodded. “A good man. Far too gentle for politics. I think that he found himself in the White House by mistake. And he was far too honest. He made those embarrassingly honest remarks about his private temptations, and the press had a field day. And every single one of those who took him to task would have harboured exactly the same sort of thoughts themselves. Who hasn’t?”

“I know all about fantasies,” said Isabel. “I know what he meant …” She paused. Peter looked at her quizzically, and she
continued quickly, “Not that sort of fantasy. I have thoughts about avalanches …”

Peter smiled and gestured to a chair. “Well,
chacun à son rêve.”

Isabel sat back in her chair and looked out over the lawn. The garden was larger than her own, and more open. Perhaps if she cut down a tree she would get more light, but she knew that she could never do that; she would have to go before the trees went. Oak trees were sobering in that respect; every time you looked at them they reminded you that they were likely to be around well after you had gone.

She looked at Peter. He was a bit like an oak tree, she thought; not to look at, of course—in that respect he was more of a wisteria, perhaps—but he was a person whom one could trust. Moreover, he was discreet, and one could talk to him without fear of what one said being broadcast. So if she asked him about McDowell’s, as she now did, nobody else would know she was interested.

He pondered her question for a moment. “I know quite a few of the people there,” he said. “They’re pretty sound, as far as I know.” He paused. “But I do know of somebody who might talk to you about them. I think he’s just left after some sort of spat. He might be prepared to talk.”

Isabel answered quickly. This was exactly what she had wanted; Peter knew everybody and could put you in touch with anyone. “That’s exactly what I would like,” she said, adding, “Thank you.”

“But you have to be careful,” Peter continued. “First, I don’t know him myself, so I can’t vouch for him. And then you have to bear in mind that he might have some sort of grudge against them. You never know. But if you want to see him, he sometimes comes to our concerts because he has a sister who plays in the orchestra.
So you need to come to our concert tomorrow night. I’ll make sure you get the chance to talk to him at the party afterwards.”

Isabel laughed. “Your orchestra? The Really Terrible Orchestra?”

“The very same,” said Peter. “I’m surprised you haven’t been to one of our concerts before. I’m sure I invited you.”

“You did,” said Isabel, “but I was away at the time. I was sorry to miss it. I gather that it was …”

“Terrible,” said Peter. “Yes, we’re no good at all, but we have fun. And most of the audience comes to laugh, anyway, so it doesn’t matter how badly we play.”

“As long as you do your best?”

“Exactly. And our best, well, I’m afraid it’s not very good. But there we are.”

Isabel looked out over the lawn. It interested her that those who had done one thing very well in their lives would often try to master something else, and fail. Peter had been a very successful financier; now he was a very marginal clarinettist; success undoubtedly made failure easier to bear, or did it? Perhaps one became accustomed to doing things well and then felt frustrated when one did other things less well. But Isabel knew that Peter was not driven in this way; he was happy to play the clarinet
modestly,
as he put it.

ISABEL CLOSED HER EYES,
and listened. The players, seated in the auditorium of St. George’s School for Girls, which patiently hosted the Really Terrible Orchestra, were tackling a score beyond their capabilities; Purcell had not intended this, and would probably not have recognised his composition. It was slightly familiar to Isabel—or passages of it were—but it seemed
to her that different sections of the orchestra were playing quite different pieces, and in different times. The strings were particularly ragged, and sounded several tones flat, while the trombones, which should have been in six-eight time, like the rest of the orchestra, seemed to be playing in common time. She opened her eyes and looked at the trombonists, who were concentrating on their music with worried frowns; had they looked at the conductor they would have been set right, but the task of reading the notes was all they could manage. Isabel exchanged smiles with the person in the seat beside her; the audience was enjoying itself, as it always did at a Really Terrible Orchestra concert.

The Purcell came to an end, to the evident relief of the orchestra, with many of the members lowering their instruments and taking a deep breath, as runners do at the end of a race. There was muted laughter amongst the audience, and the rustle of paper as they consulted the programme. Mozart lay ahead, and, curiously, “Yellow Submarine.” There was no Stockhausen, Isabel noticed with relief, remembering, for a moment, and with sadness, that evening at the Usher Hall, which was why she was here, after all, listening to the Really Terrible Orchestra labouring its way through its programme before its bemused but loyal audience.

There was rapturous applause at the end of the concert, and the conductor, in his gold braid waistcoat, took several bows. Then audience and players went through to the atrium for the wine and sandwiches that the orchestra provided its listeners in return for attendance at the concert.

“It’s the least we can do,” explained the conductor in his concluding remarks. “You have been so tolerant.”

Isabel knew a number of the players and many of those in the audience, and she soon found herself in a group of friends hovering over a large plate of smoked salmon sandwiches.

“I thought they were improving,” said one, “but I’m not so sure after this evening. The Mozart …”

“So that’s what it was.”

“It’s therapy,” said another. “Look how happy they were. These are people who could never otherwise play in an orchestra. This is group therapy. It’s great.”

A tall oboist turned to Isabel. “You could join,” he said. “You play the flute, don’t you? You could join.”

“I might,” said Isabel. “I’m thinking about it.” But she was thinking about Johnny Sanderson, who must be the man at Peter Stevenson’s side, being led in her direction by her host, and looking at her through the crowd.

“I wanted you two to meet,” said Peter, effecting the introduction. “We might be able to persuade Isabel to join us, Johnny. She’s much better than us but we could do with another flautist.”

“You could do with everything,” said Johnny. “Music lessons, to start with …”