The discussion had ended there. Isabel knew that she would be unable to change the other woman’s mind. Grace’s world was very clear: there was Edinburgh, and the values which Edinburgh endorsed; and then there was the rest. It went without saying that Edinburgh was right, and that the best that could be hoped for was that those who looked at things differently would eventually come round to the right way of thinking. When Grace had first been employed—shortly after the onset of Isabel’s father’s illness—Isabel had been astonished to find that there was somebody who was still so firmly planted in a world that she had thought had largely disappeared: the world of douce Edinburgh, erected on rigid hierarchies and the deep convictions of Scottish Presbyterianism. Grace had proved her wrong.
It was the world which Isabel’s father had come from, but from which he had wanted to free himself. He had been a lawyer, from a line of lawyers. He could have remained within the narrow world of his own father and grandfather, a world bounded by trust deeds and documents of title, but as a student he had been introduced to international law and a world of broader possibilities.
He had enrolled for a master’s degree in the law of treaties; Harvard, where he went for this, might have offered him an escape, but in the event did not. Moral suasion was brought to bear on him to return to Scotland. He almost stayed in America, but 2 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h decided at the last moment to return, accompanied by his new wife, whom he had met and married in Boston. Once in Edinburgh, he was sucked back into the family’s legal practise, where he was never happy. In an unguarded moment he had remarked to his daughter that he regarded his entire working life as a sentence which he had been obliged to serve out, a conclusion that had privately appalled Isabel. It was for this reason that when her time came to go to university, she had put to one side all thoughts of a career and chosen the subject which really interested her, philosophy.
There had been two children: Isabel, the elder of the two, and a brother. Isabel had gone to school in Edinburgh, but her brother had been sent off to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. Their parents had chosen for him a school noted for intellectual achievement, and unhappiness. What could one expect?
The placing of five hundred boys together, cut off from the world, was an invitation to create a community in which every cruelty and vice could flourish, and did. He had become unhappy and rigid in his views, out of self- defence—the character armour which Wil-helm Reich spoke about, Isabel thought, and which led to these stiff, unhappy men who talked so guardedly in their clipped voices.
After university, which he left without getting a degree, he took a job in a City of London merchant bank, and led a quiet and correct life doing whatever it was that merchant bankers did. He and Isabel had never been close, and as an adult he contacted Isabel only occasionally. He was almost a stranger to her, she thought; a friendly, if rather detached, stranger whose only real passion that she could detect was a consuming interest in the collecting of colourful old share certificates and bonds: South American railway stock, czarist long-term bonds—a whole colourful world of capital-ism. But she had once asked him what lay behind these ornately T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
2 9
printed certificates of ownership. Fourteen-hour workdays on plantations? Men working for a pittance until they were too weakened by silicosis, or too poisoned by toxins, to work anymore? (Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?)
S H E W E N T I N TO T H E L A R D E R and retrieved the ingredients for a risotto she would make for Cat and Toby. The recipe called for porcini mushrooms, and she had a supply of these, tied up in a muslin bag. Isabel took a handful of the dried fungus, savouring the unusual odour, sharp and salty, so difficult to classify. Yeast extract? She would soak them for half an hour and then use the darkened liquid they produced to cook the rice. She knew that Cat liked risotto and that this was one of her favourites, and Toby, she imagined, would eat anything. He had been brought to dinner once before, and it was at this meal that her doubts about him had set in. She would have to be careful, though, or she would end up making Grace-like judgements.
She returned to the kitchen and switched on the radio. It was the end of a news programme, and the world, as usual, was in disarray. Wars and rumours of war. A politician, a minister in the government, was being pressed for a response and refusing to answer. There was no crisis, he said. Things had to be kept in perspective.
But there is a crisis, insisted the interviewer; there just is.
That is a matter of opinion; I don’t believe in alarming people unduly.
It was in the middle of the politician’s embarrassment that 3 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the doorbell sounded. Isabel put the mushrooms into a bowl and went through to the hall to open the door. Grace had suggested that she install a spy hole in order to identify callers before she opened the door, but she had never done so. If anybody rang very late, she could peer at them through the letter box, but for the most part she would open the door on trust. If we all lived behind barriers, then we would be dreadfully isolated.
The man on the doorstep had his back to her and was looking out over the front garden. When the door opened he turned round, almost guiltily, and smiled at her.
“You’re Isabel Dalhousie?”
She nodded. “I am.” Her glance ran over him. He was in his mid-thirties, with dark, slightly bushy hair, smartly enough dressed in a dark blazer and charcoal slacks. He had small, round glasses and a dark red tie. There was a pen and an electronic diary of some sort in the top pocket of his shirt. She imagined Grace’s voice:
“I’m a journalist,” he said, showing her a card with the name of his newspaper. “My name is Geoffrey McManus.”
Isabel nodded politely. She would never read his paper.
“I wondered if I could have a word with you,” he said. “I gather you witnessed that unfortunate accident in the Usher Hall last night. Could you talk to me about it?”
Isabel hesitated for a moment, but then she stepped back into the hall and invited him in. McManus moved forward quickly, as if he was concerned that she might suddenly change her mind. “Such an unpleasant business,” he said, as he followed her into the living room at the front of the house. “It was a terrible thing to happen.”
Isabel gestured for him to sit down and she placed herself on the sofa near the fireplace. She noticed that as he sat down he T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
