T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
E
B O O K S B Y A L E X A N D E R M C C A L L S M I T H
The Girl Who Married a Lion
and Other Tales from Africa
I N T H E N O . 1 L A D I E S ’ D E T E C T I V E A G E N C Y S E R I E S
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
T H E S U N D A Y
P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
E
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h p a n t h e o n b o o k s
n e w y o r k
Copyright © 2004 by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Published simultaneously in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf, Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn, Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2004.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCall Smith, Alexander, [date]
The Sunday philosophy club / Alexander McCall Smith p. cm.
eISBN 0-375-42343-5
1. Stockbrokers—Crimes against—Fiction.
2. Edinburgh (Scotland)—
Fiction. 3. Women editors—Fiction. 4. Housekeepers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C326S86 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004044546
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T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
E
C H A P T E R O N E
E
ISABEL DALHOUSIE saw the young man fall from the edge of the upper circle, from the gods. His flight was so sudden and short, and it was for less than a second that she saw him, hair tousled, upside down, his shirt and jacket up around his chest so that his midriff was exposed. And then, striking the edge of the grand circle, he disappeared headfirst towards the stalls below.
Her first thought, curiously, was of Auden’s poem on the fall of Icarus. Such events, said Auden, occur against a background of people going about their ordinary business. They do not look up and see the boy falling from the sky.
She would have remembered the evening, even if this had not happened. She had been dubious about the concert—a performance by the Reykjavik Symphony, of which she had never heard—and would not have gone had not a spare ticket been pressed upon her by a neighbour. Did Reykjavik really have a professional symphony orchestra, she wondered, or were the players amateurs? Of course, even if they were, if they had come as far as Edinburgh to give a late spring concert, then they deserved an audience; they could not be allowed to come all the way from 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Iceland and then perform to an empty hall. And so she had gone to the concert and had sat through a first half which comprised a romantic combination of German and Scottish: Mahler, Schu-bert, and Hamish McCunn.
It was a warm evening—unseasonably so for late March—
and the atmosphere in the Usher Hall was close. She had come lightly dressed, as a precaution, and was glad that she had done so as the temperature in the grand circle inevitably climbed too high. During the interval she had made her way downstairs and had enjoyed the relief of the cooler air outside, eschewing the crush of the bar with its cacophony of conversation. She would find people she knew there, of course; it was impossible to go out in Edinburgh and not see anybody, but she was not in the mood for conversation that evening. When the time came to go back in, she toyed for a few moments with the idea of missing the second half, but she always felt inhibited from any act suggesting a lack of concentration or, worse still, of seriousness. So she had returned to her seat, picked up the programme from where she had left it on the armrest next to her, and studied what lay ahead. She took a deep
