The Sunday Philosophy Club (7 page)

Isabel burst out laughing. Grace was direct, which came, she imagined, from being brought up in a small flat off the Cowgate, a home in which there was no time for much except work, and where people spoke their minds. Isabel was conscious of how far Grace’s experience had been from her own; she had enjoyed all the privileges; she had had every chance educationally, while Grace had been obliged to make do with what was available at an indifferent and crowded school. It sometimes seemed to Isabel as if her education had brought her doubt and uncertainty, while Grace had been confirmed in the values of traditional Edinburgh. There was no room for doubt there; which had made Isabel wonder, Who is happier, those who are aware, and doubt, or those who are sure of what they believe in, and have never doubted or questioned it? The answer, she had concluded, was that this had nothing to do with happiness, which came upon you like the weather, determined by your personality.

“My friend Maggie,” Grace announced, “thinks that you can’t be happy without a man. And this is what makes her so concerned about Bill and his teenage clothes. If he goes off with a younger woman, then there’ll be nothing left for her, nothing.”

“You should tell her,” said Isabel. “You should tell her that you don’t need a man.”

She made this remark without thinking how Grace might interpret it, and it suddenly occurred to her that Grace might think that this was Isabel suggesting that Grace was a confirmed spinster, who had no chance of finding a man.

“What I meant to say,” Isabel began, “was that
one
doesn’t need—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Grace interjected. “I know what you meant.”

Isabel glanced at her quickly and then continued, “I’m not one to talk about men, anyway. I wasn’t conspicuously successful myself.”

But why? she wondered. Why had she been unsuccessful? Wrong man, or wrong time, or both?

Grace looked at her quizzically. “What happened to him, that man of yours? John what’s-his-name? That Irishman? You’ve never really told me.”

“He was unfaithful,” said Isabel, simply. “All the time when we lived in Cambridge. And then, when we went to Cornell and I was on my fellowship there, he suddenly announced that he was going off to California with another woman, a girl really, and that was it. He just left in the space of one day.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes, just like that. America went to his head. He said that it freed him up. I’ve heard that normally cautious people can go quite mad there, just from feeling free of whatever it was that was holding them back at home. He was like that. He drank more, he had more girlfriends, and he was more impetuous.”

Grace digested this. Then she asked, “He’s still there, I suppose?”

Isabel shrugged. “I assume so. But I imagine that he’s with somebody else by now. I don’t know.”

“But would you like to find out?”

The answer was that of course she would. Because against all reason, against all personal conviction, she would forgive him if he came back and asked her for forgiveness, which he would never do, of course. And that made her safe from this weakness; the fact that never again would she be bewitched by John Liamor, never again would she be in that particular and profound danger.

SHE WAS ON HER WAY
to forgetting the Usher Hall incident two weeks later when she was invited to a party at a gallery to mark the opening of a show. Isabel bought paintings, and this meant that a steady stream of gallery invitations came into the house. For the most part she avoided the openings, which were cramped and noisy affairs, riddled with pretension, but when she knew that there would be strong interest in the paintings on display she might go to the opening—and arrive early, in order to see the work before rival red dots appeared underneath the labels. She had learned to do this after arriving late for the opening of a Cowie retrospective and finding that the few paintings that had been for sale had been bought within the first fifteen minutes. She liked Cowie, who had painted haunting pictures of people who seemed to be cocooned in old-fashioned stillness; quiet rooms in which sad-faced schoolgirls were occupied in drawing or in embroidery; Scottish country roads and paths that seemed to lead into nothing but further silence; folds of cloth in the artist’s studio. She had two small Cowie oils and would have been happy to purchase another, but she had been too late and she had learned her lesson.

The show which opened that evening was of work by Elizabeth Blackadder. She had toyed with the idea of buying a large watercolour, but had decided to look at the other paintings before deciding. She did not find anything else that appealed, and when she returned, a red dot had appeared below the watercolour. A young man, somewhere in his late twenties and wearing a chalk-striped suit, was standing in front of it, glass in hand. She glanced at the painting, which seemed even more desirable now that it had been sold, and then she looked at him, trying not to show her annoyance.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” he said. “I always think of her as a Chinese painter. That delicacy. Those flowers.”

“And cats too,” Isabel said, rather grumpily. “She paints cats.”

“Yes,” said the young man. “Cats in gardens. Very comfortable. Not exactly social realism.”

“Cats exist,” said Isabel. “For cats, her paintings must be social realism.” She looked at the painting again. “You’ve just bought it?” she asked.

The young man nodded. “For my fiancée. As an engagement present.”

It was said with pride—pride in the fact of the engagement rather than in the purchase—and Isabel immediately softened.

“She’ll love it,” she said. “I was thinking of buying it myself, but I’m glad you’ve got it.”

The young man’s expression turned to concern. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “They said that it was available. There was no indication …”

Isabel brushed his comment aside. “Of course there wasn’t. It’s first come, first served. You beat me to it. Exhibitions are meant to be red in tooth and claw.”

“There are others,” he said, gesturing to the wall behind
them. “I’m sure that you’ll find something as good as this. Better, perhaps.”

Isabel smiled. “Of course I will. And anyway, my walls are so full I would have had to take something down. I don’t need another painting.”

He laughed at her comment. Then, noticing her empty glass, he offered to refill it for her, and she accepted. Returning, he introduced himself. He was Paul Hogg, and he lived one block away in Great King Street. He had seen her at one of the gallery shows, he was sure, but Edinburgh was a village, was it not, and one always saw people one had seen somewhere or other before. Did she not think that too?

Isabel did. Of course, that had its drawbacks, did it not? What if one wanted to lead a secret life? Would it not be difficult in Edinburgh? Would one have to go over to Glasgow to lead it there?

Paul thought not. He knew several people, it transpired, who led secret lives, and they seemed to do it successfully.

“But how do you know about their secret lives?” asked Isabel. “Did they tell you themselves?”

Paul thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “If they told me, then they would hardly be secret.”

“So you found out?” said Isabel. “Rather proves my point.”

He had to admit that it did, and they laughed. “Mind you,” he said, “I can’t imagine what I would do in a secret life, if I had one to lead. What is there to do that people really disapprove of these days? Nobody seems to blink an eyelid over affairs. And convicted murderers write books.”

“Indeed they do,” said Isabel. “But are these books really any good? Do they really say anything to us? Only the very immature and the very stupid are impressed by the depraved.” She was
silent for a moment. Then: “I suppose there must be something that people are ashamed of and are prepared to do in secret.”

“Boys,” said Paul. “I know somebody who goes for boys. Nothing actually illegal. Seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds. But really just boys still.”

Isabel looked at the painting, at the flowers and the cats. It was a long way from the world of Elizabeth Blackadder.

“Boys,” she said. “I suppose some people find boys … how shall I put it? Interesting. One might want to be secretive about that. Not that Catullus was. He wrote poems about that sort of thing. He seemed not in the slightest bit embarrassed. Boys are a recognised genre in classical literature, aren’t they?”

“This person I know goes off to Calton Hill, I think,” said Paul. “He drives up there in an empty car and drives down again with a boy. In secret, of course.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Oh well. People do these things.” There were things happening on one side of Edinburgh the other did not know a great deal about. Of course, Edinburgh, it was said, was built on hypocrisy. It was the city of Hume, of course, the home of the Scottish Enlightenment, but then what had happened? Petty Calvinism had flourished in the nineteenth century and the light had gone elsewhere; back to Paris, to Berlin, or off to America, to Harvard and the like, where everything was now possible. And Edinburgh had become synonymous with respectability, and with doing things in the way in which they had always been done. Respectability was such an effort, though, and there were bars and clubs where people might go and behave as they really wanted to behave, but did not dare do so publicly. The story of Jekyll and Hyde was conceived in Edinburgh, of course, and made perfect sense there.

“Mind you,” Paul went on, “I have no secret life myself. I’m
terribly conventional. I’m actually a fund manager. Not very exciting. And my fiancée works in Charlotte Square. So we’re not really … how might one put it?”

“Bohemian?” said Isabel, laughing.

“That’s right,” he said. “We’re more …”

“Elizabeth Blackadder? Flowers and cats?”

They continued their conversation. After fifteen minutes or so, Paul put his glass down on a windowsill.

“Why don’t we go to the Vincent Bar?” he said. “I have to meet Minty at nine, and I can’t be bothered to go back to the flat. We could have a drink and carry on talking. That’s if you’d like to. You may have other things to do.”

Isabel was happy to accept. The gallery had filled up and was beginning to get hot. The level of conversation had risen, too, and people were shouting to be heard. If she stayed she would have a sore throat. She collected her coat, said good-bye to the gallery owners, and walked out with Paul to the small, unspoilt bar at the end of the road.

The Vincent Bar was virtually empty and they chose a table near the front door, for the fresh air.

“I hardly ever go to a pub,” said Paul. “And yet I enjoy places like this.”

“I can’t remember when I was last in one,” said Isabel. “Maybe in an earlier life.” But of course she could remember those evenings, with John Liamor, and that was painful.

“I was a fund manager in an earlier life, I suspect,” said Paul. “And presumably that’s what I’ll be in the next.”

Isabel laughed. “Surely your job must have its moments,” she said. “Watching markets. Waiting for things to happen. Isn’t that what you do?”

“Oh, I suppose it has its moments,” he said. “You have to read
a lot. I sit at my desk and go through the financial press and company reports. I’m a sort of spy, really. I collect intelligence.”

“And is it a good place to work?” asked Isabel. “Are your colleagues agreeable people?”

Paul did not answer immediately. Lifting his glass, he took a long sip of his beer. When he answered, he looked down at the table as he spoke. “By and large, yes. By and large.”

“Which means no,” said Isabel.

“No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that … well, I lost somebody who worked for me. A few weeks ago. I have—had—two people under me in my department, and he was one of them.”

“He went elsewhere?” asked Isabel. “Lured away? I gather that everybody’s frantically busy headhunting everybody else. Isn’t that the way it works?”

Paul shook his head. “He died,” he said. “Or rather, he was killed. In a fall.”

It could have been a climbing accident; those happened in the Highlands virtually every week. But it was not, and Isabel knew it.

“I think I know who it was,” she said. “Was it at—”

“The Usher Hall,” said Paul. “Yes. That was him. Mark Fraser.” He paused. “Did you know him?”

“No,” said Isabel. “But I saw it happen. I was there, in the grand circle, talking to a friend, and he came falling down, right past us, like a … like a …”

She stopped, and reached out to touch Paul’s arm. He was clutching his glass, staring down at the table, appalled by what she was saying.

I
T ALWAYS HAPPENED
when one was in a room with smokers. She remembered reading somewhere that the reason for it was that the surfaces of nonsmokers’ clothes were covered with negative ions, while tobacco smoke was full of positive ions. So when there was smoke in the air, it was immediately attracted to the oppositely charged surface, which made one’s clothes smell. And that was why, when she lifted up the jacket that she had been wearing the previous evening and which she had left lying across the top of her bedroom chair, she was assailed by the stale, acrid smell of tobacco smoke. There had been smokers in the Vincent Bar, as there always were in bars, and even though she and Paul had sat near the door, it had been enough to leave its mark.