Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

just yet.

“Twenty-five letters today,” said Grace. “I counted them.

Ten manuscripts—ten! Four parcels that look like books, one of them extremely heavy. And eleven letters, of which three are bills, in my opinion.”

Isabel thanked her. It had become something of a ritual in recent months for Grace to attend the opening of the mail and for Isabel to hand on to her those items that could be placed straight in the recycling pile. Some were placed in the pile unsullied; others were torn up by Grace according to a system F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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of her own devising. She never tore up anything from the Conservatives, but the other parties were torn up or spared according to her view of their current performance.

Isabel opened a letter with a neatly typed envelope. “My friend, Julian,” she said. She read the brief letter, laughing aloud at its conclusion.

“I believe he’s serious,” she said, passing the letter to Grace.

“An offer of a paper on the ethics of the buffet bar.”

Grace read the letter and passed it back to Isabel. “Of course it’s theft,” she said. “Helping oneself to bread rolls like that. Surely he can see that.”

“Julian Baggini is a subtle man,” said Isabel. “And his question is a serious one. Is it ethical to take extra bread rolls from the hotel buffet? And use them for your picnic lunch?”

“Really,” Grace snorted. “Is that what your readers want to read about?”

Isabel thought for a moment. “We could do a special issue on the ethics of food,” she mused. “We could use Julian’s paper there.”

“The ethics of food?”

Isabel picked up her paper-knife and stroked the edge.

“Food is a more complex subject than one might think, you know. There is every reason why a philosopher should think about food.”

“One of them being hunger,” retorted Grace.

Isabel conceded the point. “Philosophers are no different from anybody else. Philosophers have their needs.” She looked at the letter again. “Buffet bars. Yes. I can just imagine the problems.”

“Theft,” repeated Grace. “You shouldn’t take what’s not yours. Is there anything more you can say about it?”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel put her hands behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. Grace was in some matters, though not in others, a reductionist, a consummate wielder of Occam’s razor; which was a good thing, in a way.

“But it’s not always clear what’s yours and what isn’t yours,”

Isabel countered. “You may think that you’re entitled to that extra bread roll, but what if you’re not? What if the hotel intends that you should take only one?”

“Then you’ve taken something that you think is yours, but which isn’t,” said Grace. “And that isn’t theft—at least it’s not theft in my book.”

Isabel contemplated this for a moment. Two people go to a party, she thought, both with similar-looking umbrellas. One person leaves the party early. He takes an umbrella which he thinks is his, but he discovers when he gets home that it is the wrong one. That, she imagined, was not theft, in the moral sense at least, and surely it would not be theft in the legal sense.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered a discussion with a lawyer about that, a sharp-nosed advocate who spoke in a deliberate, pedantic way but who had a mind like . . . well, Occam’s razor. He had said something about how the law allowed a defence of error, as long as one’s error was reasonable; which in itself seemed reasonable enough.

“The law uses tests of reasonableness,” he had said, and he had proceeded to give her examples which had stuck in her mind.

“Take causation,” he went on. “You’re responsible for those consequences of your acts which a reasonable person would foresee. You aren’t responsible for anything outside that. So let me tell you about a real case. A had assaulted B and B was lying F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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on the ground, bleeding from a head wound. Along came C, who had attended a first-aid course. He had been taught about tourniquets and so he applied a tourniquet.”

“To the neck?”

“Unfortunately, yes. And the question was whether A was responsible for B’s death—which of course was by asphyxiation rather than loss of blood. What do you do about an unreasonable rescuer?”

Isabel had managed to keep a straight face, but only just.

This was, after all, a tragedy. “And was he?” she asked.

The lawyer frowned. “Sorry,” he replied. “I can’t for the life of me remember the outcome. But here’s another one. A has a fight with B, who pushes him out of the window. A doesn’t fall very far as he’s wearing braces, or suspenders, as the Americans rather more accurately call them. These get caught on the balcony and he ends up suspended. A crowd gathers