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.”
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“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
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 T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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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.”
John Liamor gathered about him a salon of acolytes. These were students who were as much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas. It 4 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was the seventies, and the frothiness of the previous decade had subsided. What remained to believe in, or indeed to mock? Ambition and personal gain, those heady gods of the following decade, were in the wings, but not centre stage, which made a brooding Irishman with an iconoclastic talent an intriguing option. With John Liamor it was not essential to believe in anything; all that was required was the ability to mock. And that was where his real appeal lay; he could sneer at the sneerers themselves because he was Irish and they, for all their radicalism, were still English and therefore, in his view, irretrievably part of the whole apparatus of oppression.
Isabel did not fit easily into this circle, and people remarked on the unlikely nature of the developing liaison. John Liamor’s detractors, in particular—and he was not popular in his college, nor in the philosophy department— found the relationship a strange one. These people resented Liamor’s intellectual condescension, and its trappings; he read French philosophy and peppered his remarks with references to Foucault. And, for one or two of them at least, those who
At times she herself found it surprising that she was so attracted to him. It was almost as if there was nowhere else to go; that they were two people thrown together on a journey, who found themselves sharing the same railway compartment and T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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becoming resigned to each other’s company. Others found a more prosaic explanation. “Sex,” observed one of
