The Sunday Philosophy Club (24 page)

They stopped outside the flat in Nelson Street. Toby paid off the taxi while Cat waited on the steps. There were lights inside; Fiona was in. Waiting for Toby, she rang the bell, glancing at him as she did so. He was fiddling with the paper in which the bottle of champagne had been twist-wrapped.

“You’ll tear it,” she said.

“What?”

“You’ll tear the paper.”

The door opened. It was not Fiona, but another woman. She looked at Cat blankly, and then saw Toby.

“Fiona …,” began Cat.

“Not in,” said the other woman. She moved forward towards Toby, who seemed for a moment to back away, but she reached out and took his wrist. “Who’s your friend?” she said. “Toby? Who—”

“Fiancée,” said Cat. “I’m Cat.”

I
SABEL HAD POSTED
her letter of apology to Cat the day before the Really Terrible Orchestra concert and Cat had responded a couple of days later. The reply came on a card bearing Raeburn’s picture of the Reverend Robert Walker skating on the ice at Duddingston Loch, a picture as powerful and immediately recognisable, in its local way, as
The Birth of Venus.
Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different.

She turned the eighteenth-century clergyman on his back and read Cat’s message:
Of course, you’re forgiven. You always are. Anyway, something has happened, and it has proved that you were right. There, I thought that would be so difficult to say, and I suppose it was. My pen almost ground to a halt. But anyway come and have coffee in the shop and I can let you try this new cheese that’s just come in. It’s Portuguese and it tastes of olives. Cat.

Isabel felt grateful for her niece’s good nature, even if an aspect of that same nature was a lack of judgement when it came
to men. There were many young women who would not so readily have forgiven the intrusion; and of course there were fewer still who would have admitted that an aunt was right in such a matter. Of course, this was welcome news, and Isabel looked forward to finding out how Toby had been exposed; perhaps Cat had followed him, as she herself had, and had been led to a conclusion by that most convincing of evidence—the evidence of one’s own eyes.

She walked into Bruntsfield, savouring the warmth which was beginning to creep into the sun. There was building work in Merchiston Crescent—a new house was being crammed into a small corner plot, and there was a bag of cement on the muddy pavement. Then, a few steps later, she saw gulls, circling above roofs, looking for a place to nest. The gulls were considered pests in the neighbourhood—large, mewing birds that swooped down on those who came too close to their nesting places—but we humans built too, and left cement and stones and litter, and were as aggressively territorial. The review was planning an environmental ethics issue the following year and Isabel had been soliciting papers. Perhaps somebody would write about the ethics of litter. Not that there was much to say about that: litter was unquestionably bad and surely nobody would make a case in its favour. And yet why was it wrong to drop litter? Was it purely an aesthetic objection, based on the notion that the superficial pollution of the environment was unattractive? Or was the aesthetic impact linked to some notion of the distress which others felt in the face of litter? If that was the case, then we might even have a duty to look attractive to others, in order to minimise their distress. There were interesting implications to that.

And one of these implications presented itself to Isabel a mere fifty paces later, outside the post office, from which emerged
a young man in his mid-twenties—Jamie’s age, perhaps—with several sharp metal spikes inserted into his lower lip and chin. The sharp metal points jutted out jauntily, like tiny sharpened phalluses, which made Isabel reflect on how uncomfortable it must have been to kiss a man like that. Beards were one thing—and there were women who complained vigorously about the reaction of their skins to contact with bearded men—but how much more unpleasant it would be to feel these metal spikes up against one’s lips and cheeks. Cold, perhaps; sharp, certainly; but then, who would wish to kiss this young man, with his scowl and his discouraging look? Isabel asked herself the question and answered it immediately: of course numerous girls would wish to kiss him, and probably did; girls who had rings in their belly buttons and their noses, and who wore studded collars. Spikes and rings were complementary; after all. All this young man would have to do was look for the corresponding plumage.

As she crossed the road to Cat’s delicatessen, Isabel saw the spiky young man dart across the road ahead of her and suddenly stumble at the edge of the pavement. He tripped and fell, landing on a knee on the concrete paving stone. Isabel, a few steps behind him, hastened to his side and reached out to him, helping him to his feet. He stood up, and looked down at the ripped knee of his discoloured denim jeans. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

“Thank you.” His voice was soft, with a hint of Belfast in it.

“It’s so easy to stumble,” said Isabel. “Are you all right?”

“I think so. I’ve torn my jeans, that’s all. Still, you pay for ripped jeans these days. I got mine free.”

Isabel smiled, and suddenly the words came out of her, unbidden, unanticipated. “Why have you got those spikes in your face?”

He did not look annoyed. “My face? These piercings?” He fingered at the spike which projected from his lower lip. “It’s my jewellery, I suppose.”

“Your jewellery?” Isabel stared at him, noticing the tiny golden ring which he had inserted into an eyebrow.

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wear jewellery. I wear jewellery. I like it. And it shows that I don’t care.”

“Don’t care about what?”

“About what people think. It shows that I have my own style. This is me. I’m not in anybody’s uniform.”

Isabel smiled at him. She appreciated his directness, and she liked his voice with its definite cadences. “Good for you,” she said. “Uniforms are not a good idea.” She paused. The sun was glinting off one of the spikes, casting a tiny, bobbing reflection onto his upper lip. “Unless, of course, you have donned another uniform in your eagerness to avoid uniforms. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

The young man tossed his head backwards. “Okay,” he said, laughing. “I’m the same as everybody else with piercings. So?”

ISABEL LOOKED AT HIM.
This was a strange conversation, and she would have liked to prolong it. But she reminded herself that she had to see Cat and that she could not spend the morning standing there with that young man discussing facial piercing. So they said good-bye to each other, and she made her way into the delicatessen, where Eddie, standing beside a shelf on which he was stacking Portuguese sardines, glanced at her and then looked back, with some intensity, at the sardines.

She found Cat in her office, finishing off a telephone call. Her niece replaced the receiver and looked at her. Isabel noticed,
with relief, that there seemed to be no resentment in her expression. The card she received had reflected what Cat really felt. Good.

“You got my card?”

“Yes, I did. And I’m still very sorry that I upset you. I take no pleasure in hearing about it.” She knew, as she said this, that it was not true, and faltered at the last words.

Cat smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. But let’s not talk about it if you don’t mind.”

They drank a cup of coffee together and then Isabel returned home. There was work to do—a new crop of articles had arrived for the review—but she found that she could not settle to it. She wondered when she would hear from Johnny Sanderson, if he would call back at all.

HE DID TELEPHONE
Isabel, as he had said he would, a few days after the Really Terrible Orchestra concert. He could meet her, he said, at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society rooms in Leith that Friday evening at six. There was a whisky nosing, and she could sample the whisky—if she had the stomach for it. He had information for her, which he could pass on at the event itself. There would be opportunities to talk.

Isabel knew very little about whisky, and rarely drank it. But she knew that it had much the same apparatus of sampling as did wine, even if the language was very different. Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of
stale seaweed,
or even
diesel fuel.
Isabel saw the merit in this. The Island malts, which she could barely bring
herself to sample—in spite of her father’s enthusiasm for them—reminded her of antiseptic and the smell of the school swimming pool; and as for taste, “diesel fuel” seemed to express it perfectly. Not that she would utter these views in the rooms of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, or even confess them to Johnny Sanderson, who was said by some to have whisky in his veins, on the strength of four generations of Highland distillers in his pedigree, starting, he proudly pointed out, with a humble crofter who ran an illegal still at the back of his sheep fank. Purveyors of alcohol were well known to found dynasties, of course: that was the case, she thought, with a politician whom Isabel’s grandfather had known slightly before the Second World War. Isabel’s grandfather, a principled man, had seen through him and had rebuffed an enticing offer for their company. Thereafter he had merely shuddered when the politician’s name was mentioned, an eloquent enough comment—more expressive, indeed, than mere words.

Isabel was amused by the idea that gestures should accompany verbal references. She was intrigued to see devout Catholics cross themselves at the mention of the BVM—and she liked the acronym BVM itself, which made Mary sound so reassuringly modern and competent, like a CEO or an ICBM, or even a BMW. And in places like Sicily, there were people who spat to the side when the names of their enemies were uttered, or as was sometimes the case in Greece, when Turkey or even a Turk was spoken of. She recalled the Greek uncle of a friend of hers, who was protected by his family from all mention of Turkey, lest he have a heart attack. Or the proprietor of a Greek island hotel at which she had once stayed, who refused to acknowledge that the distant coast of Turkey could just be made out from the terrace of the hotel; he simply denied that land could be seen, and did not see it. So might one wish Turkey out of existence, if one were so
inclined. All of this was to be avoided, of course, and Isabel knew it. She had never spat at the mention of a name, or even rolled her eyes upwards—well, that perhaps she had done once or twice, when the name of a well-known figure in the arts cropped up. But that, she felt, was fully justified, unlike the views of Greeks on Turks, and of Turks, one imagined, on Greeks.

Johnny Sanderson was already there when she arrived, and he led her to a quiet seat in the corner of the room.

“One question right at the beginning,” he said. “Do you like it, or hate it? If you hate it, I’ll get you a glass of wine instead.”

“I like some whiskies,” said Isabel. “Some.”

“Such as?”

“Speysides. Soft whiskies. Whiskies that don’t bite.”

Johnny nodded. “Reasonable enough,” he said. “Macallan. A lovely fifteen-year-old Speyside. It would offend nobody.”

Isabel sat back while Johnny went to order the whiskies from the bar. She liked this temple to whisky, with its high ceilings and its airiness. And she liked the people, too: direct and open-faced people who believed in fellowship and good humour. They were people, she imagined, who did not disapprove of their fellow man, unlike those who patrolled mores today; these people were tolerant, just as gourmets, by and large, tended to have tolerant, expansive outlooks. It was the obsessive dieters who were unhappy and anxious.

A paper had been submitted to the review which suggested that there was a duty to be thin. “Fat Is a Moral Issue” had been the title which the author had chosen; Isabel thought it an intriguing title. But the argument was poor; entirely predictable and entirely depressing. In a world of need, it was wrong to be anything other than thin. Until everybody was in a position to
consume a surfeit of calories, then nobody should carry extra weight. The fat were therefore not entitled to be what they were.
Fairness of distribution
demanded otherwise.

She had read the paper with increasing irritation, but then, at the end, when she had tossed it aside and gone into the kitchen for a slice of cake, she had paused at the very plate on which the cake rested, and stopped, and thought. The author of “Fat Is a Moral Issue” may have been pious in her tone, but she was right: the claims of the needy for food were moral claims of a particular sort. One could not ignore them—one could not walk away from them, even if those who made them on behalf of the hungry sounded like killjoys. And that, perhaps, was the problem: it was the
tone
with which the author had made her point—her
accusing
tone—that had irritated Isabel; it was the moral condescension in it that made her feel that she was being accused of self-indulgence and greed. But the fundamental truth contained in her paper could not be shrugged off: we cannot ignore the pleas of the hungry. And if that meant that we needed to examine the overconsumption which deprived others of food, then that had to be done. And with that thought, she had looked at the cake and then put it back in its tin in the cupboard.