The Sunday Philosophy Club

For a moment their eyes met. Isabel froze in her embarrassment. The woman at the window looked vaguely familiar, but she could not quite place her. For a moment neither did anything more, and then, just as an expression of annoyance began to replace the look of surprise on the householder’s face, Isabel dragged her gaze away and looked at her watch. She would put on an act of absentmindedness. Halfway down Dundas Street, she suddenly stopped and tried to remember what it was that she had forgotten. She stood there, staring into space (or a small amount of space) and then she looked at her watch and remembered.

It worked. The woman inside turned away, and Isabel continued down the hill, noticing that Toby had now moved on and was about to cross the street into Northumberland Street. Isabel stopped again, this time with all the legitimacy of a shopwindow before her, and looked into this while Toby completed his crossing.

This was the moment of decision. She could stop this ridiculous pursuit now, while she was still following a route which she could claim, quite truthfully, to have been following already, or she could continue to trace Toby’s steps. She hesitated for a moment and then, looking casually up and down for traffic, she sauntered across the street. But even as she did so, it occurred to her that what she was doing was quite ridiculous. She was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, and she was sidling along an Edinburgh street, in broad daylight, following a young man; she who believed in privacy, who abjured the sheer vulgarity of our nosy, prying age, was behaving like a schoolboy fantasist.

Why was it that she allowed herself to get drawn into the busi-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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ness of others, like some sordid gumshoe (was that what they called them?).

Northumberland Street was one of the narrower streets in the New Town. Built on a somewhat smaller scale than the streets to the north and the south of it, it had its adherents, who liked what they tended to describe as an “intimacy.” Isabel, by contrast, found it too dark—a street without outlook and without that sense of elevation and grandeur which made living in the New Town so exhilarating. Not that she would choose to live there herself, of course; she preferred the quiet of Merchiston and Morningside, and the pleasure of a garden. She looked up at the house on her right, which she knew when John Pinkerton had lived there. John, who had been an advocate and who knew more about the history of Edinburgh’s architecture than most, had created a house which was flawlessly Georgian in all respects. He had been such an entertaining man, with his curious voice and his tendency to make a noise like a gobbling turkey when he cleared his throat, but had been so generous too, and had lived up to his family motto, which was simply Be Kind. No man had inhabited the city so fully, known all its stones; and he had been so brave on his early deathbed, singing hymns, of all things, perfectly remembered, as he remembered everything. The deathbed: she remembered now that poem that Douglas Young had written for Willie Soutar: Twenty year beddit, and nou/the mort-claith. /

Was his life warth livin? Ay / siccar it was. / He was eident, he was blye / in Scotland’s cause. Just as John had been. Scotland’s cause: Be Kind.

Toby had slowed down now, and was almost strolling. Isabel was concerned that he might turn round at any point, and in this much smaller street, he could hardly fail to notice her. Of course, 1 0 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that need not be unduly embarrassing; there was no reason why she should not be walking down this particular street on a Saturday afternoon, just as he was doing. The only difference between them, she thought, was that he was clearly going somewhere and she had no idea where she would end up.

At the eastern end of Northumberland Street the road took a sharp turn down to the left and became Nelson Street, a rather more promising street, Isabel had always thought. She had known a painter who lived there, in a top-floor flat with skylights that faced north and which admitted a clear light that suffused all his paintings. She had known him and his wife well, and had often gone for dinner with them before they left to live in France.

There he stopped painting, she had heard, and grew vines instead. Then he died suddenly, and his wife married a French-man and moved to Lyons, where her new husband was a judge.

She heard from her from time to time, but after a few years the letters stopped. The judge, she was told by others, had become involved in a corruption scandal and had been sent to prison in Marseilles. The painter’s widow had moved to the south to be able to visit her husband in prison, but had been too ashamed to tell any of her old friends about what had happened. Nelson Street, then, was a street of mixed associations for Isabel.

Swinging his plastic shopping bag as he walked, Toby crossed to the far side of Nelson Street, watched discreetly by a now almost loitering Isabel. He looked up at the tenement building and then briefly glanced at his watch. He was now directly outside a set of five stone steps that led up to the door of one of the ground-floor flats. Isabel saw him pause for a moment, and then he strode up the steps and pushed the button of the large brass bell to the side of the door. She held back now, taking advantage of the cover provided by a van which was parked near the corner 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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of the street. After a moment, the door opened and she saw a young woman, dressed, she thought, in a T-shirt and jeans, come forward from the dark of the hall, momentarily into the light, and there, in Isabel’s full view, lean toward Toby, put her arms round his shoulders, and kiss him.

He did not reel back; of course not. He bent forward in her arms, lowered his shopping bag to the floor, and then embraced her, pushing her gently back into the hallway. Isabel stood quite still. She had not expected this. She had expected nothing. But she had not thought that her whimsical decision of five minutes ago would have led to a conclusive affirmation of her earlier intu-itions about Toby. Unfaithful.

She stood there for a few minutes more, her gaze fixed on the closed door. Then she turned away and walked back up Northumberland Street, feeling dirtied by what she had seen, and by what she had done. In such a way, and with such a heart, must people creep away from brothels or the locus of an illicit assignation; mortal, guilty, as WHA would have it in that grave poem in which he describes the aftermath of the carnal, when sleeping heads might lie, so innocently, upon faithless arms.

C H A P T E R T E N

E

GRACE SAID: “I was standing there at the bus stop, waiting for a bus. They’re meant to come every twelve minutes, but that’s laughable. Laughable. There was a puddle of water on the road and a car went past, driven by a young man in a baseball cap, back to front, and he splashed this woman who was standing next to me. She was soaked through. Dripping. He saw it, you know. But did he stop to apologise? Of course not. What do you expect?”

“I don’t expect anything,” said Isabel, warming her hands round her mug of coffee. “It’s the decline of civility.