The Sunday Philosophy Club

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choice—thank heavens. And yet, was she any happier than they were, these women with their safe husbands and their children who were set to become like their parents and perpetuate this whole, self-confident world of haut-bourgeois Edinburgh? Probably not; they were happy in their way ( I must not be condescending, she thought), and she was happy in hers. And Grace in hers and Jamie in his, and Minty Auchterlonie . . . She stopped herself, and thought. Minty Auchterlonie’s state of mind is simply no concern of mine. No, she would not go to Jenners that morning, but she would walk into Bruntsfield and buy something that smelled nice from Mellis’s cheese shop and then drink a cup of coffee in Cat’s delicatessen. Then, that evening, there was a lecture she could attend at the Royal Museum of Scotland. Professor Lance Butler of the University of Pau, a lecturer whom she had heard before and who was consistently entertaining, would speak on Beckett, as he always did. That was excitement enough for one day.

And of course there were the crosswords. Downstairs now, she retrieved the newspapers from the mat on the hall and glanced at the headlines. new concern for cod stocks, she read on the front page of The Scotsman, and saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what culture would a generation of computer operators leave behind them? She answered her own question: more than one might imagine—an electronic culture of e-mail tales and computer-generated images, fleeting and derivative, but a culture nonetheless.

She turned to the crossword, recognising several clues immediately. The falls, artist is confusingly preceded again (7), which required no more than a moment’s thought: Niagara. Such a 2 0 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cliche in the crossword world, and this irritated Isabel, who liked novelty, however weak, in clues. And then, to pile Pelion (6) upon Ossa (4), there was Writers I shortly have, thoughtful (7). Isabel was pensive, which solved that one, until she tripped up over An unending Greek god leads to an exclamation, Mother! (6). This could only be zeugma—Zeu(s) g (gee!) ma—a word with which she was unfamiliar, and it sent her to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which confirmed her suspicion. She liked Fowler ( avian hunter of words, she thought) for his opinions, which were clear and directive. Zeugmata, he explained, were a bad thing and incorrect—unlike syllepses, with which they were commonly confused. So Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair was sylleptical, requiring a single word to be understood in a different sense, while See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned was a zeugma and called for the insertion of another quite different verb, surrounded, which was not there.

By the time that Grace arrived, Isabel had finished her breakfast and had dealt with the morning mail. Grace, who was late, arrived in a state of anxiety and a taxi; a sylleptical arrival, Isabel noted. Grace was strict about punctuality and hated to be even a few minutes late, hence the costly taxi and the anxiety.

“The battery of my alarm clock,” she explained as she came into the kitchen, where Isabel was sitting. “You never think of changing them, and then they die on you.”

Isabel had already prepared the coffee and she poured her housekeeper a cup, while Grace tidied her hair in front of the small mirror that she had hung on the wall beside the pantry door.

“I was at my meeting last night,” Grace said, as she took her first sip of coffee. “There were more people there than usual. And a very good medium—a woman from Inverness—who was quite 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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remarkable. She got right to the heart of things. It was quite uncanny.”

Grace went on the first Wednesday of each month to a spiri-tualist meeting in a street off Queensferry Place. Once or twice she had invited Isabel to accompany her but Isabel, who feared that she might laugh, had declined the invitation and Grace had not persevered. Isabel did not approve of mediums, who she felt were, for the most part, charlatans. It seemed to her that many of the people who went to such meetings (although not Grace) had lost somebody and were desperate for contact beyond the grave.

And rather than help them to let go, these mediums encouraged them to think that the dead could be contacted. In Isabel’s view it was cruel and exploitative.

“This woman from Inverness,” Grace went on, “she’s called Annie McAllum. You can tell that she’s a medium just by looking at her. She has that Gaelic colouring—you know, the dark hair and the translucent skin. And green eyes too. You can tell that she has the gift. You can tell.”

“But I thought that anybody could be a medium,” said Isabel.

“You don’t have to be one of those fey Highlanders to do it.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Grace. “We had a woman from Bir-mingham once. Even from a place like that. The gift can be received by anyone.”

Isabel suppressed a smile. “And what did this Annie McAllum have to say?”

Grace looked out the window. “It’s almost summer,” she said.

Isabel stared at her in astonishment. “That’s what she said?

Now, that’s really something. You have to have the gift to work that out.”

Grace laughed. “Oh no. I was just looking out at the magnolia. I said that it’s almost summer. She said lots of things.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Such as?”

“Well,” said Grace, “there’s a woman called Lady Strath-martin who comes to the meetings. She’s well into her seventies now and she’s been coming to the meetings for years apparently, since well before I joined. She lost her husband, you see, quite a long time ago—he was a judge—and she likes to contact him on the other side.”

Isabel said nothing, and Grace continued. “She lives in Ainslie Place, on the north side, and the Italian consul, a