The Sunday Philosophy Club (5 page)

“That might tell us something. You know. Something about what he was feeling. About what happened.”

She stared at him for a moment, struggling with her distaste for his insensitivity. “I didn’t see his face. I’m sorry.”

“But you saw his head? Was he turned away from you, or facing you?”

Isabel sighed. “Mr. McManus, it all happened very quickly, in a second or so. I don’t think I saw very much. Just a body falling from above, and then it was all over.”

“But you must have noticed something about him,” McManus insisted. “You must have seen something. Bodies are made up of faces and arms and legs and all the rest. We see individual bits as well as the whole.”

Isabel wondered whether she could ask him to leave, and decided that she would do so in a moment. But his line of questioning suddenly changed.

“What happened afterwards?” he asked. “What did you do?”

“I went downstairs,” she said. “There was a group of people in the foyer. Everybody was pretty shocked.”

“And then you saw him being carried out?”

“I did.”

“And that’s when you saw his face?”

“I suppose so. I saw him going out on the stretcher.”

“Then what did you do? Did you do anything else?”

“I went home,” said Isabel sharply. “I gave my statement to the police and then I went home.”

McManus fiddled with his pencil. “And that was all you did?”

“Yes,” said Isabel.

McManus wrote something down in his notebook. “What did he look like on the stretcher?”

Isabel felt her heart thumping within her. There was no need for her to put up with any more of this. He was a guest—of sorts—in her house and if she no longer wished to discuss the matter with him, then she had only to ask him to leave. She took a deep breath. “Mr. McManus,” she began, “I really do not think that there’s much point in going into these matters. I cannot see what bearing it has on any report which you will publish of the incident. A young man fell to his death. Surely that is enough. Do your readers need to know anything more about how he looked on the way down? What do they expect? That he was laughing as he fell? That he looked cheerful on the stretcher? And his parents—what do they expect of them? That they are devastated? Really, how remarkable!”

McManus laughed. “Don’t tell me my job, Isabel.”

“Ms. Dalhousie, actually.”

“Oh yes, Ms. Dalhousie. Spinster of this parish.” He paused. “Surprising, that. You being an attractive woman, sexy if I may say so …”

She glared at him, and he looked down at his notebook.

“I have things to do,” she said, rising to her feet. “Would you mind?”

McManus closed his notebook, but remained seated.

“You’ve just given me a little lecture on how the press should behave,” he said. “I suppose you’re entitled to do that, if you wish. But it’s a pity your own moral authority is a little bit shaky.”

She looked at him blankly, uncertain how to interpret his remark.

“You see, you lied,” McManus went on. “You said that you went home, whereas I happen to know, from my conversations
with the police, and with somebody else, that you went upstairs. You were seen looking down from the exact spot where he fell. But you very carefully failed to mention this to me. In fact, you said that you went home. Why would you lie to me, I wonder.”

Isabel answered quickly. “I had no reason to tell you that. It had nothing at all to do with the incident.”

“Really?” sneered McManus. “But what if I said that I thought you know more about this incident than you’re letting on? Don’t you think I’d be entitled to reach that conclusion now?”

Isabel moved towards the door and opened it pointedly. “I don’t have to put up with this in my own home,” she said. “If you wouldn’t mind leaving now.”

McManus rose to his feet, taking his time. “Sure,” he said. “It’s your house. And I have no wish to outstay my welcome.”

She walked to the hallway and opened the front door. McManus followed, stooping for a moment to inspect a painting on the way.

“You have some beautiful things,” he said. “Money?”

C
OOKING IN A TEMPER
required caution with the pepper; one might put far too much in and ruin a risotto in sheer pique. She felt dirtied by contact with McManus, as she inevitably did on those occasions when she found herself talking to somebody whose outlook on life was completely amoral. There were a surprising number of such people, she thought, and they were becoming more common; people to whom the idea of a moral sense seemed to be quite alien. What had appalled her most about McManus was the fact that he intended to talk to the parents, whose grief counted less for him than the desire of the public to witness the suffering of others. She shuddered. There was nobody, it seemed, to whom one might appeal; nobody who seemed prepared to say: Leave those poor people in peace.

She stirred the risotto, taking a small spoonful to test it for seasoning. The liquid from the soaked porcini mushrooms had imparted its flavour to the rice, and it was perfect. Soon she could put the dish in the lower oven and leave it there until Cat and Toby sat down with her at the table. In the meantime, there was a salad to prepare and a bottle of wine to open.

She felt calmer by the time the doorbell rang and she admitted
her guests. The evening had turned cool, and Cat was wearing a full-length brown coat which Isabel had bought her for a birthday several years ago. She took this off and laid it down on a hall chair, revealing a long red dress underneath. Toby, who was a tall young man a year or two older than Cat, was wearing a dark brown tweed jacket and a roll-top shirt underneath. Isabel glanced at his trousers, which were crushed-strawberry corduroy; exactly what she would expect him to wear. He had never surprised her in that respect. I must try, she thought. I have to try to like him.

Cat had brought a plate of smoked salmon, which she took through to the kitchen with Isabel while Toby waited for them in the downstairs drawing room.

“Are you feeling any better?” Cat asked. “You seemed so miserable this morning.”

Isabel took the plate of fish from her niece and removed the protective covering of foil.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m feeling much better.” She did not mention the journalist’s visit, partly because she wanted not to be thought to be dwelling on the subject and partly because she wanted to put it out of her mind.

They laid out the salmon and returned to the drawing room. Toby was standing at the window, his hands clasped behind his back. Isabel offered her guests a drink, which she poured from the cabinet. When she handed his drink to Toby he raised it to her and gave the Gaelic toast.

“Slaint,”
said Toby.

Isabel raised her glass weakly.
Slaint,
she was sure, would be Toby’s only word of Gaelic, and she did not like the peppering of one language with words from others;
pas du tout.
So she muttered, under her breath,
“Brindisi.”

“Brin
what?” asked Toby.

“Brindisi,”
said Isabel. “The Italian toast.”

Cat glanced at her. She hoped that Isabel would not be mischievous: she was perfectly capable of winding Toby up.

“Isabel speaks quite good Italian,” Cat said.

“Useful,” said Toby. “I’m no good at languages. A few words of French, I suppose, left over from school, and a bit of German. But nothing else.”

Toby reached for a piece of brown bread and smoked salmon. “I can’t resist this stuff,” he said. “Cat gets it from somebody over in Argyll. Archie somebody, isn’t it, Cat?”

“Archie MacKinnon,” said Cat. “He smokes it himself in his garden, in one of those old smoking sheds. He soaks it in rum and then puts it over oak chips. It’s the rum that gives it that wonderful flavour.”

Toby reached for another of the largest pieces.

Cat quickly picked up the plate and offered it to Isabel. “I go up and see Archie when I go to Campbelltown,” she said, placing the plate at Isabel’s side. “Archie is a wonderful old man. Eighty-something, but still going out in his boat. He has two dogs, Max and Morris.”

“After the boys?” said Isabel.

“Yes,” said Cat.

Toby looked at the salmon. “What boys?”

“Max and Morris,” said Isabel. “Two German boys. The very first comic-book characters. They got up to all sorts of mischief and were eventually chopped into pieces by a baker and made into biscuits.”

She looked at Toby. Max and Morris had fallen into the baker’s flour vat and had been put into a mixing machine. The biscuits into which they had been made were eventually eaten by
ducks. Such a Germanic idea, she thought; and for a moment she imagined that this might happen to Toby, tumbling into such a machine and being made into biscuits.

“You’re smiling,” said Cat.

“Not intentionally,” said Isabel hurriedly. Did one ever mean to smile?

They talked for half an hour or so before the meal. Toby had been skiing with a group of friends and he talked about his off-piste adventures. There had been an awkward moment when they had caused a halfhearted avalanche, but they had managed to get out of trouble.

“A rather close thing,” he said. “You know what an avalanche sounds like?”

“Surf?” suggested Isabel.

Toby shook his head. “Thunder,” he said. “Just like thunder. And it gets louder and louder.”

Isabel imagined the scene—Toby in a strawberry-coloured ski suit with a tidal wave of snow hurtling down towards him, and the sun on the white peaks of the mountains. And then, just for a moment, she saw the snow overtake him and cover his flailing limbs in a churning of white, and then stillness, and there would be nothing but the tip of a ski pole to mark the spot. No, that was an unworthy thought, every bit as bad as imagining him being made into biscuits, and she put it out of her mind. But why had Cat not gone? She enjoyed skiing, but perhaps Toby had not invited her.

“You didn’t want to go, Cat?” she asked. It was a potentially awkward question, but there was something in the self-assuredness of this young man that made her feel mischievous.

Cat sighed. “The shop,” she said. “I can’t get away. I’d have loved to have gone. But I just couldn’t.”

“What about Eddie?” said Toby. “Surely he’s old enough to look after things for a week or so. Can’t you trust him?”

“Of course I can trust him,” Cat retorted. “It’s just that Eddie is a bit … vulnerable.”

Toby looked sideways at her. He was sitting beside Cat on the sofa near the window and Isabel thought that she detected an incipient sneer. This was interesting.

“Vulnerable?” Toby said. “Is that what you call it?”

Cat looked down at her glass. Isabel watched Toby. There was a touch of cruelty in the face, she thought; just below the surface, below that well-scrubbed, slightly pink look. And the face was very slightly fleshy, she thought, and in ten years’ time his nose would begin to droop and … She stopped herself. She did not warm to him, but charity, the demands of which one should never forget, nudged at her gently.

“He’s a nice boy,” Cat mumbled. “He’s had a hard time. And I can rely on him absolutely. He’s very nice.”

“Of course he is,” said Toby. “Bit of a wimp, though, isn’t he? Just a bit … you know.”

Isabel had been watching in discreet fascination, but now she felt that she would have to intervene. She did not want Cat embarrassed in this way, even if the prospect of scales tumbling from Cat’s eyes was an attractive one. What did she see in him? Was there anything at all, apart from the fact that he was a perfect specimen of a certain sort of thoughtless masculinity? The language of Cat’s generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a
hunk.
But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?

Look at John Liamor. He could talk for hours and every bit of it was interesting. People would sit, more or less at his feet, and
listen to him. What did it matter that he was thin and had that pale, almost translucent skin that went with a certain form of Celtic colouring? He was beautiful, in her eyes, and interesting, and now another woman, somebody whom she would never meet, somebody far away in California or wherever it was, had him for herself.

Isabel had met him in Cambridge. She was at Newnham, in the last year of her philosophy degree. He was a research fellow, a few years older than her, a dark-haired Irishman, a graduate of University College Dublin, who had been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Clare College and was writing a book on Synge. He had rooms at the back of the college, looking out over the Fellows’ Garden on the other side of the river, and he invited Isabel to these rooms, where he sat and smoked, and looked at her. She was disconcerted by his gaze, and she wondered whether, in her absence, he talked as condescendingly—and wittily—of her as he did of others.

John Liamor felt that most people in Cambridge were provincial—he came from Cork, originally, which presumably was anything but provincial. He despised the products of expensive English schools—“little Lord Fauntleroys”—and he sneered at the clerics who still peopled the college. “Reverend,” the title still borne by many dons in subjects as diverse as mathematics and classics, he changed to “Reversed,” which Isabel and others, without knowing quite why they should do so, found funny. The principal of his college, a mild man, an economic historian, who had never been anything but generous and accommodating to his Irish guest, he described as the “chief obscurantist.”