The Sunday Philosophy Club

“If you insist,” Jamie said. “I suppose it sounds feasible enough.

I’ll come along if you insist. Really insist.”

He could have been more accommodating, thought Isabel after she had rung off, but at least he had agreed. Now she would have to telephone Paul Hogg at McDowell’s and ask him if and when it would be convenient to visit him. She was confident that he would welcome her suggestion. They had got on well together, and apart from the moment when she had inadvertently triggered in him a painful memory, the evening they had spent together had been a success. He had suggested, had he not, that she meet his fiancee, whose name she had forgotten but who could be referred to for the time being simply as “fiancee.”

She telephoned at 10:45, a time when she believed there was the greatest chance that anybody who worked in an office would be having their morning coffee, and in fact he was, when she asked him.

“Yes. I’m sitting here with the FT on my desk. I should be reading it, but I’m not. I’m looking out the window and drinking my coffee.”

“But I’m sure that you’re about to take important decisions,”

she said. “And one of them will be whether you would allow me to look at your Blackadder again. I want to ask her to do one for me, and I thought that it might be helpful to look at yours again.”

“Of course,” he said. “Anybody can look at it. It’s still in the exhibition. It has another week to run.”

Isabel was momentarily taken by surprise. Of course she should have telephoned the gallery to find out whether the show was still on, and if it was, she should have waited until he had collected his painting.

“But it would be very nice to see you anyway,” Paul Hogg went on helpfully. “I have another Blackadder you might like to see.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h They made the arrangement. Isabel would come the following evening, at six, for drinks. Paul Hogg was perfectly happy for her to bring somebody with her too, a young man who was very interested in art and whom she would like him to meet. Of course that would be perfectly convenient, and nice too.

It was so easy, thought Isabel. It was so easy dealing with people who were well-mannered, as Paul Hogg was. They knew how to exchange those courtesies which made life go smoothly, which was what manners were all about. They were intended to avoid friction between people, and they did this by regulating the contours of an encounter. If each party knew what the other should do, then conflict would be unlikely. And this worked at every level, from the most minor transaction between two people to dealings between nations. International law, after all, was simply a system of manners writ large.

Jamie had good manners. Paul Hogg had good manners. Her mechanic, the proprietor of the small backstreet garage where she took her rarely used car for servicing, had perfect manners.

Toby, by contrast, had bad manners; not on the surface, where he thought, quite wrongly, that it counted, but underneath, in his attitude to others. Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete moral seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs.

Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this, and it always showed. They were impatient with those whom they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged. The person with good manners, however, would always listen to such people and treat them with respect.

How utterly shortsighted we had been to listen to those who thought that manners were a bourgeois affectation, an irrelevance, which need no longer be valued. A moral disaster had ensued, 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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because manners were the basic building block of civil society.

They were the method of transmitting the message of moral consideration. In this way an entire generation had lost a vital piece of the moral jigsaw, and now we saw the results: a society in which nobody would help, nobody would feel for others; a society in which aggressive language and insensitivity were the norm.

She stopped herself. This was a train of thought which, though clearly correct, made her feel old; as old as Cicero declaim-ing, O tempora! O mores! And this fact, in itself, demonstrated the subtle, corrosive power of relativism. The relativists had suc-ceeded in so getting under our moral skins that their attitudes had become internalised, and Isabel Dalhousie, with all her interest in moral philosophy and distaste for the relativist position, actually felt embarrassed to be thinking such thoughts.

She must stop this musing on moral imagination, she thought, and concentrate on things of more immediate importance, such as checking the morning’s mail for the review and finding out why that poor boy Mark Fraser fell to his death from the gods. But she knew she would never abandon these broader issues; it was her lot. She may as well accept it. She was tuned in to a different sta-tion from most people and the tuning dial was broken.

She telephoned Jamie, forgetting that he would already have caught his train to Glasgow and would be, more or less at that moment, drawing into Queen Street Station. She waited for his answering machine to complete its speech, and then she left a message.

Jamie, yes I’ve phoned him, Paul Hogg. He was happy for us to call to see him tomorrow at six. I’ll meet you half an hour before that, in the Vincent Bar. And Jamie, thanks for everything. I really appreciate your help on this. Thanks so much.

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

E

SHE WAS ANXIOUS in the pub, waiting for Jamie. It was a masculine place, at least at that hour, and she felt ill at ease.

Women could go to pubs by themselves, of course, but she nonetheless felt out of place. The bartender, who served her a glass of bitter lemon with ice, smiled at her in a friendly way and commented on the fine evening. The clocks had just been put forward, and the sun was not setting now until after seven.

Isabel agreed, but could think of nothing useful to add, so she said: “It’s spring, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” said the barman. “But you never know.”