The Sunday Philosophy Club

woman, lives below her. They go to a lot of things together, but she’s never brought the consul to our meetings until last night. And so she was sitting there, in the circle, and Annie McAllum suddenly turned to her and said: I can see Rome. Yes, I can see Rome. I caught my breath at that. That was amazing. And then she said: Yes, I think that you’re in touch with Rome. ”

There was a silence as Grace looked expectantly at Isabel and Isabel stared mutely at Grace. Eventually Isabel spoke. “Well,”

she said cautiously, “perhaps that’s not all that surprising. She is, after all, the Italian consul, and you would normally expect the Italian consul to be in touch with Rome, wouldn’t you?”

Grace shook her head, not in denial of the proposition that Italian consuls were in touch with Rome, but with the air of one who was expected to explain something very simple which simply had not been grasped. “But she wasn’t to know that she was the Italian consul,” she said. “How would somebody from Inverness know that this woman was the Italian consul? How would she have known?”

“What was she wearing?” asked Isabel.

“A white gown,” said Grace. “It’s really a white sheet, made up into a gown.”

“The Italian consul? A white gown?”

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“No,” said Grace, again with a patient look. “The mediums often put on a gown like that. It helps them make contact. No, the Italian consul was wearing a very smart dress, if I remember correctly. A smart dress and smart Italian shoes.”

“There you are,” said Isabel.

“I don’t see how that makes any difference,” said Grace.

H A D G R AC E H A D the gift, then she might have said: Expect a telephone call from a man who lives in Great King Street, which is what happened that morning at eleven. Isabel was in her study by then, having postponed the walk into Bruntsfield until noon, and was engrossed in a manuscript on the ethics of memory. She set aside her manuscript reluctantly and answered the call. She had not expected Paul Hogg to telephone her, nor had she anticipated the invitation to drinks early that evening—a totally impromptu party, he pointed out, with no notice at all.

“Minty’s keen that you should come,” he said. “You and your friend, that young man. She really hopes that you’ll be able to make it.”

Isabel thought quickly. She was no longer interested in Minty; she had taken the decision to abandon the whole issue of insider trading and Mark’s death, and she was not sure whether she should now accept an invitation which appeared to lead her directly back into engagement with the very people she had decided were no concern of hers. And yet there was an awful fascination in the prospect of seeing Minty up close, as one viewed a specimen. She was an awful woman—there was no doubt about that—but there could be a curious attraction in the awful, as there was in a potentially lethal snake. One liked to look at it, to stare into its eyes. So she accepted, adding that she was not 2 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sure whether Jamie would be free, but she would ask him. Paul Hogg sounded pleased, and they agreed on a time. There would only be one or two other people there, he said, and the party would be over in good time for her to make her way up to the museum and Professor Butler’s lecture.

She returned to the article on the ethics of memory, abandon-ing the thought of the walk to Bruntsfield. The author of the paper was concerned with the extent to which the forgetting of personal information about others represented a culpable failure to commit the information to memory. “There is a duty to at least attempt to remember,” he wrote, “that which is important to others. If we are in a relationship of friendship or dependence, then you should at least bother about my name. You may fail to remember it, and that may be a matter beyond your control—a nonculpable weakness on your part—but if you made no effort to commit it to memory in the first place, then you have failed to give me something which is my due, recognition on your part of an important aspect of my identity.” Now this was certainly right: our names are important to us, they express our essence. We are protective of our names and resent their mishandling: Charles may not like being called Chuck, and Margaret may not approve of Maggie. To Chuck or Maggie a Charles or a Margaret in the face of their discomfort is to wrong them in a particularly personal way; it is to effect a uni-lateral change in what they really are.

Isabel paused in this line of thought and asked herself: What is the name of the author of this paper I am reading? She realised that she did not know, and had not bothered with it when she had taken the manuscript from the envelope. Had she failed in a duty to him? Would he have expected her to have his name in her mind while she read his work? He probably would.

She thought about this for a few minutes, and then rose to 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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her feet. She could not concentrate, and she certainly owed the author her undivided attention. Instead she was thinking of what lay ahead: a drinks party in Paul Hogg’s flat that had clearly been engineered by Minty Auchterlonie. Minty had been flushed out, that at least was clear; but it was not clear to Isabel what she should now do. Her instinct was to abide by her decision to dis-engage. I need to forget all this, she thought; I need to forget, in an act of deliberate forgetting (if such a thing is really possible).

The act of a mature moral agent, an act of recognition of the moral limits of duty to others . . . but what, she wondered, would Minty Auchterlonie be wearing? Now she laughed at herself. I am a philosopher, Isabel thought, but I am also a woman, and women, as even men know, are interested in what others wear.

That is not something of which women should be ashamed; it is men who have the gap in their vision, rather as if they did not notice the plumage of the birds or the shape of the clouds in the sky, or the red of the fox on the wall as he sneaked past Isabel’s window. Brother Fox.

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SHE MET JAMIE at the end of Great King Street, having seen him walking up the hill, across the slippery cobbles of Howe Street.