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 fiancee. 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 5 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h 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 T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
5 5
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 5 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h terribly conventional. I’m actually a fund manager. Not very exciting. And my fiancee works in Charlotte Square. So we’re not really . . . how might one put it?”
