The Sunday Philosophy Club

he had rapidly changed the subject, a shadow had fallen over their evening. But before they finished their drinks and went their separate ways, he had said something which had made her sit up sharply. “He would never have fallen. He had a head for heights, you see. He was a climber. I went with him up Buchaille Etive Mhor. He went straight up. An absolute head for heights.”

She had stopped him and asked him what he meant. If he would not have fallen, then had he deliberately jumped? Paul had shaken his head. “I doubt it. People surprise you, but I just cannot see why he would have done that. I spent hours with him earlier that day, hours, and he was not in the least bit down. Quite the opposite, in fact; one of the companies which he had drawn to our attention, and in which we had invested heavily, had come up with a spectacular set of interim results. The chairman had sent him a memo congratulating him on his perspicacity and he was very pleased with this. Smiling. Cat with the cream. Why would he do himself in?”

Paul had shaken his head, and then had changed the subject, leaving her to wonder. And now she was wondering again, as she went downstairs for breakfast. Grace had arrived early and had put on her egg to boil. There were comments on a story in the newspapers; a government minister had been evasive in parlia-mentary question time and had refused to give the information which the opposition had requested. Grace had put him down as a liar the first time she saw his photograph in the paper, and now 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h here was the proof. She looked at her employer, challenging her to deny the proposition, but Isabel just nodded.

“Shocking,” she said. “I can’t remember when exactly it was that it became all right to lie in public life. Can you remember?”

Grace could. “President Nixon started it. He lied and lied.

And then it came across the Atlantic and our people started to lie too. That’s how it started. Now it’s standard practise.”

Isabel had to agree. People had lost their moral compass, it seemed, and this was just a further example. Grace, of course, would never lie. She was completely honest, in small things and big, and Isabel trusted her implicitly. But then Grace was not a politician, and never could be one. The first lies, Isabel assumed, had to be told at the candidate selection board.

Of course, not all lies were wrong, which was another respect, Isabel thought, in which Kant was mistaken. One of the most ridiculous things that he had ever said was that there was a duty to tell the truth to the murderer looking for his victim. If the murderer came to one’s door and asked, Is he in? one would be obliged to answer truthfully, even if this would lead to the death of an innocent person. Such nonsense; and she could remember the precise offending passage: Truthfulness in statements which cannot be avoided is the formal duty of an individual to everyone, however great may be the disadvantage accruing to himself or to another. It was not surprising that Benjamin Constant should have been offended by this, although Kant responded—unconvincingly—

and tried to point out that the murderer might be apprehended before he acted on the knowledge which he had gained from a truthful answer.

The answer, surely, is that lying in general is wrong, but that some lies, carefully identified as the exception, will be permissible. There were, therefore, good lies and bad lies, with good lies 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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being uttered for a benevolent reason (to protect the feeling of another, for example). If somebody asked one’s opinion of a newly acquired—but tasteless—possession, for instance, and one gave an honest answer, then that could hurt feelings and deprive the other of the joy of ownership. So one lied, and praised it, which was surely the right thing to do. Or was it? Perhaps it was not as simple as that. If one became accustomed to lying in such circumstances, the line between truth and falsehood could become blurred.

Isabel thought that she might visit this issue in detail one day and write a paper on the subject. “In Praise of Hypocrisy” might be a suitable title, and the article might begin: “To call a person a hypocrite is usually to allege a moral failing. But is hypocrisy inevitably bad? Some hypocrites deserve greater consideration . . .”

There were further possibilities. Hypocrisy was not only about telling lies, it was about saying one thing and doing quite the other. People who did that were usually roundly condemned, but again this might not be as simple as some would suggest. Would it be hypocritical for an alcoholic to advise against drinking alcohol, or a glutton to recommend a diet? The recipient of the advice might well level charges of hypocrisy in such a case, but only if the person giving the advice claimed that he did not drink or eat too much himself. If he merely concealed his own vices, then he might still be considered a hypocrite, but his hypocrisy might be no bad thing. It certainly did not harm anybody, and indeed it might even help (provided that it remained undiscovered). This was a topic which would have been ideal for the Sunday Philosophy Club. Perhaps she would try to get people together for precisely such a discussion. Who could resist an invitation to discuss hypocrisy? The members of the club, she suspected.

Her boiled egg placed on the table, she sat down with a copy 6 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of The Scotsman and a freshly brewed cup of coffee, while Grace went off to start the laundry. There was nothing of note in the paper—she could not bring herself to read an account of the doings of the Scottish Parliament—and so she quickly passed to the crossword. Four across: He conquers all, a nubile tram (11) .

Tamburlaine, of course. It was an old clue and it even appeared as the final line of one of Auden’s poems. WHA, as she thought of him, liked to do the crossword, and would have The Times deliv-ered to Kirchstetten for that very purpose. There he lived, in his legendary domestic mess, with manuscripts and books and over-flowing ashtrays, doing the Times crossword each day, with a tat- tered volume of the big Oxford open on a chair beside him. She would have so loved to have met him, and talked, even just to thank him for everything that he had written (except the last two books), but she rather feared that he might have written her off as one of his legion of bluestocking admirers. Six down: A homespun poet, a pig in charge of sheep? (4). Hogg, naturally. (But a coincidence, nonetheless.)

She finished the crossword in the morning room, allowing her second cup of coffee to get too cool to drink. She felt uneasy for some reason, almost queasy, and she wondered whether she had not perhaps had rather too much to drink the previous evening. But, going over it, she had not. She had had two small-ish glasses of wine at the opening, and a further one, if somewhat larger, in the Vincent Bar. That was hardly enough to unsettle her stomach or trigger a headache. No, her feeling of unease was not physical; she was upset. She had imagined that she had recovered from witnessing that awful event, but clearly she had not, and it was still having its psychological effect. Putting down the newspaper, she looked up at the ceiling and wondered whether this was what they called post-