The Sunday Philosophy Club

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“McDiarmid, or Christopher Grieve, to give him his real name, is the wordiest. The best is the tall man, Norman McCaig.

But he’ll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one’s soul.” He had paused, and then asked: “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

And Isabel had said, “No.”

G R AC E A S K E D H E R AG A I N : “Do you think he jumped?”

“We did not see him actually fall over the edge,” Isabel said, folding the newspaper in such a way as to reveal the crossword.

“We saw him on the way down—after he had slipped or whatever.

I told the police that. They took a statement from me last night.”

“People don’t slip that easily,” muttered Grace.

“Yes, they do,” said Isabel. “They slip. All the time. I once read about somebody slipping on his honeymoon. The couple was visiting some falls in South America and the man slipped.”

Grace raised an eyebrow. “There was a woman who fell over the crags,” she said. “Right here in Edinburgh. She was on her honeymoon.”

“Well, there you are,” said Isabel. “Slipped.”

“Except some thought she was pushed,” countered Grace.

“The husband had taken out an insurance policy on her life a few weeks before. He claimed the money, and the insurance company refused to pay out.”

“Well, it must happen in some cases. Some people are pushed. Others slip.” She paused, imagining the young couple in South America, with the spray from the falls shooting up and the man tumbling into the white, and the young bride running back 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h along the path, and the emptiness. You loved another, and this made you so vulnerable; just an inch or so too close to the edge and your world could change.

She picked up her coffee and began to leave the kitchen.

Grace preferred to work unobserved, and she herself liked to do the crossword in the morning room, looking out onto the garden.

This had been the ritual for years, from the time that she had moved back into the house until now. The crossword would start the day, and then she would glance at the news itself, trying to avoid the salacious court cases which seemed to take up more and more newspaper columns. There was such an obsession with human weakness and failing; with the tragedies of peoples’ lives; with the banal affairs of actors and singers. You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seemed to her to be voyeurism, or even a form of moralistic tale telling. And yet, she thought, do I not read these things myself ? I do. I am just as bad as everybody else, drawn to these scandals. She smiled ruefully, noticing the heading: minister’s shame rocks parish. Of course she would read that, as everybody else would, although she knew that behind the story was a personal tragedy, and all the embarrassment that goes with that.

She moved a chair in the morning room so that she would be by the window. It was a clear day, and the sun was on the blossom on the apple trees which lined one edge of her walled garden.

The blossom was late this year, and she wondered whether there would be apples again this summer. Every now and then the trees became barren and produced no fruit; then, the following year, they would be laden with a proliferation of small red apples that she would pick and make into chutney and sauce according to a recipe which her mother had given her.

Her mother—her sainted American mother—had died when 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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Isabel was eleven, and the memories were fading. Months and years blurred into one another, and Isabel’s mental picture of the face that looked down at her as she was tucked into bed at night was vague now. She could hear the voice, though, echoing somewhere in her mind; that soft southern voice that her father had said reminded him of moss on trees and characters from Ten-nessee Williams plays.

Seated in the morning room with a cup of coffee, her second, on the glass-topped side table, she found herself stuck over the crossword puzzle at an inexplicably early stage. One across had been a gift, almost an insult— They have slots in the gaming indus-try (3-5-7). One-armed bandits. And then, He’s a German in control (7). Manager, of course. But after a few of this standard, she came across Excited by the score? (7) and Vulnerable we opined desultorily (4, 4), both of which remained unsolved, and ruined the rest of the puzzle. She felt frustrated, and cross with herself.

The clues would resolve themselves in due course, and come to her later in the day, but for the time being she had been defeated.

She knew, of course, what was wrong. The events of the previous night had upset her, perhaps more than she realised. She had had trouble in getting to sleep, and had awoken in the small hours of the morning, got out of bed, and gone downstairs to fetch a glass of milk. She had tried to read, but had found it difficult to concentrate, and had switched off the light and lain awake in bed, thinking about the boy and that handsome, composed face.

Would she have felt differently if it had been somebody older?

Would there have been the same poignancy had the lolling head been grey, the face lined with age rather than youthful?

A night of interrupted sleep, and a shock like that—it was small wonder that she could not manage these obvious clues. She tossed the newspaper down and rose to her feet. She wanted to 1 8