The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

and whose husband had died on a North Sea oil platform. There had been an explosion, Grace had told her, and Georgina had been left alone with her aged mother. It was the explosion, Isabel imagined, that had begun the path that led to the spiritualist meetings and the quest for a message from the other side. The other side—that was what Grace called it, although Isabel preferred the other shore, if one were to have an expression for a place whose existence was debatable. How crowded that shore must be, she thought, and how lost the wraiths upon it, jostling one another, waiting for some ghostly ferry; but she immediately reproached herself for the thought. If people needed to believe in the existence of another shore, then who was she to deny them that comfort? And Isabel had enough humility to recognise that there might come a time when she would take comfort in just such language and precisely such a notion. Perhaps that time had already come; if the miracle of Charlie had done anything for her, it had made her more convinced that a life without a spiritual dimension—whatever form that spiritual dimension took—was a shallow one. Not that this would ever induce her to await a message from one of Grace’s mediums…

“And this man—this Shetlander—had a message for Georgina?”

Grace nodded. “He did.”

Isabel looked down at the crossword. A timely spirit? Zeitgeist, of course. Another coincidence.

“What did he say? Anything specific?”

When she replied, Grace’s tone was cagey. “He said quite a bit. There was somebody on the other side who had seen her husband. That was the message.”

Isabel’s eyes widened. “Seen him? In the flesh?” She could not help wondering: If the husband had died in an explosion, then what if…what if he was not all there? Or did the bits come back together again on the other side?

Grace sighed. “The other side is part of the spirit world,” she said. “I did tell you, you know. We don’t have the same form once we’ve crossed over.”

Isabel wondered how people recognised one another if they did not have the same form. Or did knowledge in that dimension not depend on the senses? She wanted to ask Grace about this, but the words died on her lips. Her question would not sound serious, however careful she was in the framing of it, and Grace, who was sensitive on these matters, would take offence, would become taciturn. It was just too easy to poke fun at spiritualist beliefs; Madame Arcati and her blithe spirits never seemed far away, with their knocking once for yes and twice for no and all their Delphic predictions.

She folded up her newspaper and rose to her feet. As editor—and now owner—of the Review of Applied Ethics, Isabel was free of the tyranny of office hours, but she was conscientious to a fault. She had worked out that the editing of the journal and dealing with all the correspondence this entailed took about thirty hours of her time each week. That did not amount to a full-time job, but it was close enough, and it did mean that if she took a day off she would notice it in the resultant buildup of work. So she had stuck to a pattern of working for at least three hours every morning and two hours in the afternoon or evening. Of course, there were weeks when she worked much more than that, particularly in the couple of weeks before the publication of an issue—the Review was a quarterly—when last-minute editing or proofreading queries inevitably arose. Then the button was eventually pushed and the Review went to print. Isabel liked the expression that newspaper journalists used: they put the paper to bed. It was a comfortable, maternal metaphor, she felt, and she imagined herself tucking a set of proofs under the sheets and kissing it good night. Children had that warm, freshly bathed bedtime smell; the Review would smell of ink, she thought, when she put it to bed.

Grace turned round from the sink. “You’re working this morning?”

“I have to,” said Isabel. “I’ll take Charlie out this afternoon.”

It was the usual arrangement. Grace had welcomed the arrival of Charlie just over sixteen months ago, and although they had never formalised things, she had expanded her job to include helping with him. This suited both of them very well. For Grace, it was the chance that she herself had never been given to play a part in bringing up a child, and the fact that she had become besotted with Charlie also helped. For Isabel, it meant not only that she could get on with her work, but also that the time she spent with Charlie was unaffected by the sheer exhaustion that a small child can bring to his parents.

“I’ll take him down to the canal,” said Grace. “He loves the boats. Maybe he’ll become a sailor when he grows up.”

Isabel frowned. Charlie would not be a sailor. He would be…Her frown turned into a smile. There were mothers, she assumed, who marked their children down for a career when they were still babes in arms, just as in the past they had promised children in marriage. Of course, hardly anybody did that now, but we still worked hard enough to make sure that our children turned out reasonably like ourselves. We enrolled them in religions; we made them learn musical instruments we ourselves would have liked to play; we burdened them with family names. And here she was thinking that Charlie would not be a sailor, because being a sailor had not been on her agenda for him. But he might want to be a sailor…

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Perhaps he will be a sailor. Anything is possible.”

“But not a soldier,” said Grace.

Isabel agreed. Charlie would never be a soldier. He would be far too gentle for that. He would be like his father, like Jamie. He would be musical. He would be gentle. Jamie could never point a rifle at anybody, she thought, even if they deserved it—which one’s enemies always did, of course.

Then Grace muttered: “I was in love with a soldier once.”

Isabel, on the point of leaving the room, stopped in her tracks; a soldier had never been mentioned before. She waited for Grace to say something more, but she did not, and continued with her work at the sink in silence.

THE MORNING POST had arrived. Isabel collected it as she left the kitchen on her way to the study, scooping up the envelopes that the postman had stuffed through the front door. She could tell at a glance that there was nothing personal in the mail, and that just about everything was for the Review. She noticed a bill from the printer and a letter from Jim Childress at the University of Virginia; the remaining six items were manuscripts from prospective authors. These she would look at that morning and, if worth sending for peer review, she would dispatch them in the afternoon post. The rest would be returned to their authors, but only after a few days had elapsed; it would be rude to send them back the same day—authors looked at postmarks and were always ready to detect cavalier rejection. Of course, Isabel would not reject anything groundlessly; she read each paper and gave it the consideration that it deserved. But even then, there were some papers that were just so amateurish or, in certain cases, so clearly the product of delusion or paranoia that there was no point in reading beyond the first page or two. She handled these carefully, as on more