was not. So I said, past what? And he didn’t reply.”
“Trying,” said Isabel.
“Poor Maggie,” Grace went on. “He goes off to these clubs and never takes her, not that she would want to go anyway. She sits at home and worries about what he’s getting up to. But there’s not much I can do. I did give him a book, though.”
“And what was that?”
“It was a dog-eared old book. I found it in a bookshop in the West Port.
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.”
T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
5 1
“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
“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?”
5 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h 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.
S H E WA S O N H E R 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.
T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
5 3
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,
