The Sunday Philosophy Club

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h talk to somebody, to discuss what had happened last night. There was no point in discussing it further with Grace, who would only engage in unlikely speculation and would wander off into long stories about disasters which she had heard about from friends. If urban myths had to start somewhere, Isabel thought that they might begin with Grace. She would walk to Bruntsfield, she decided, and speak to her niece, Cat. Cat owned a delicatessen on a busy corner in the popular shopping area, and provided that there were not too many customers, she would usually take time off to drink a cup of coffee with her aunt.

Cat was sympathetic, and if Isabel ever needed to set things in perspective, her niece would be her first port of call. And it was the same for Cat. When she had difficulties with boyfriends—

and such difficulties seemed to be a constant feature of her life—

that was the subject of exchanges between the two of them.

“Of course, you know what I’m going to tell you,” Isabel had said to her six months before, just before the arrival of Toby.

“And you know what I’ll say back to you.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I suppose I do. And I know that I shouldn’t say this, because we shouldn’t tell others what to do. But—”

“But you think I should go back to Jamie?”

“Precisely,” said Isabel, thinking of Jamie, with that lovely grin of his and his fine tenor voice.

“Yes, Isabel, but you know, don’t you? You know that I don’t love him. I just don’t.”

There was no answer to that, and the conversation had ended in silence.

S H E F E T C H E D H E R COAT, calling out to Grace that she was going out and would not be back for lunch. She was not sure 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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whether Grace heard—there was the whine of a vacuum cleaner from somewhere within the house—and she called out again.

This time the vacuum cleaner was switched off and there was a response.

“Don’t make lunch,” Isabel called. “I’m not very hungry.”

Cat was busy when Isabel arrived at the delicatessen. There were several customers in the shop, two busying themselves with the choice of a bottle of wine, pointing at labels and discussing the merits of Brunello over Chianti, while Cat was allowing another to sample a sliver of cheese from a large block of pecorino on a mar-ble slab. She caught Isabel’s eye and smiled, mouthing a greeting.

Isabel pointed to one of the tables at which Cat served her customers coffee; she would wait there until the customers had left.

There were continental newspapers and magazines neatly stacked beside the table and she picked up a two- day-old copy of Corriere della Sera. She read Italian, as did Cat, and skipping the pages devoted to Italian politics—which she found impenetrable—she turned to the arts pages. There was a lengthy reevalua-tion of Calvino and a short article on the forthcoming season at La Scala. She decided that neither interested her: she knew none of the singers referred to in the headline to the La Scala article, and Calvino, in her view, needed no reassessment. That left a piece on an Albanian filmmaker who had become established in Rome and who was attempting to make films about his native country. It turned out to be a thoughtful read: there had been no cameras in Hoxha’s Albania, apparently—only those owned by the security police for the purpose of photographing suspects. It was not until he was thirty, the director revealed, that he had managed to get his hands on any photographic apparatus. I was trembling, he said. I thought I might drop it.

Isabel finished the article and put down the newspaper. Poor 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h man. All those years which had been wasted. Whole lifetimes had been spent in oppression and the denial of opportunities.

Even if people knew, or suspected, that it would come to an end, many must have imagined that it would be too late for them.

Would it help to know that one’s children might have what one was not allowed to taste for oneself ? She looked at Cat. Cat, who was twenty-four, had never really known what it was like when half the world—or so it seemed—had been unable to talk to the other half. She had been a young girl when the Berlin Wall came down, and Stalin, and Hitler, and all the other tyrants were distant historical figures to her, almost as remote as the Borgias.

Who were her bogeymen? she wondered. Who, if anyone, would really terrify her generation? A few days earlier she had heard somebody on the radio say that children should be taught that there are no evil people and that evil was just that which people did. The observation had arrested her: she was standing in the kitchen when she heard it, and she stopped exactly where she stood, and watched the leaves of a tree move against the sky outside. There are no evil people. Had he actually said that? There were always people who were prepared to say that sort of thing, just to show that they were not old-fashioned. Well, she suspected that one would not hear such a comment from this man from Albania, who had lived with evil about him like the four walls of a prison.

She found herself gazing at the label of a bottle of olive oil which Cat had placed in a prominent position on a shelf near the table. It was painted in that nineteenth-century rural style which the Italians use to demonstrate the integrity of agricultural products. This was not from a factory, the illustration proclaimed; this was from a real farm, where women like those shown on the bottle pressed the oil from their own olives, where there were large, 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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sweet-smelling white oxen and, in the background, a mousta-chioed farmer with a hoe. These were decent people, who believed in evil, and in the Virgin, and in a whole bevy of saints. But of course they did not exist anymore, and the olive oil probably came from North Africa and was rebottled by cynical Neapolitan businessmen who only paid lip service to the Virgin, when their mothers were within earshot.

“You’re thinking,” said Cat, lowering herself into the other chair. “I can always tell when you’re thinking