The Right Attitude to Rain

the philosopher or the street person? She smiled at the additional confusion; the man in the street was not a street person, by definition.

Grace came in, bearing a cup of coffee. “You look harassed,”

she said, placing the cup and saucer before Isabel. “I thought that you might need this.”

“I certainly do,” said Isabel. “And, Grace, how about this?

What do you understand by street person?”

Grace frowned. “Street person? Oh, we see them all right.

Have you walked down by the bottom of the Playfair Steps recently? You see street persons down there, if that’s what you want to call them.”

“Beggars?”

Grace looked disapproving. “Some of them. But some do other things. Deal in drugs.”

“And use them.”

Grace nodded. “But it’s the beggars that get me. Beggars used to be old and crabbit, remember? There was that man T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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whom everybody called the Glasgow Road Tramp. He was a great character. He wore an old army helmet and used to say to everybody that he had just come in off the Glasgow Road and could one spare him the price of a cup of tea.”

Isabel smiled as she remembered him. He was a much-loved character in the city and everybody gave him money. But he was, of course, a genuine tramp, with boots stuffed with newspapers and a determined walk. Surely it was of the essence of a tramp that he should actually tramp; just as Shakers shook and whirling dervishes whirled.

“But these new beggars,” Grace went on. “They’re nineteen, twenty, or thereabouts. And they just sit there and ask for money. I never give them anything. Never. They could work.

There’s no real unemployment in this city, after all. Everywhere you go you see signs offering work. Just about every cafe has one. Dishwashers and so on.”

Isabel listened politely. What Grace said was true, but only to an extent. Some of these street people were genuinely homeless—young people in flight from their homes in Dun-fermline or Airdrie or somewhere, running away from abuse or tyranny, or sheer disorder. And they ended up on the street because they had no skills and it was easy.

“I don’t give them any money,” said Isabel quietly. “But sometimes I feel bad about that.”

Grace snorted. “And why should you feel bad? Why should you feel bad when you know what they’re going to do with it?”

Isabel did not answer Grace’s question. The street people at the bottom of the Playfair Steps were a difficult case to defend, even if they deserved defending. She was thinking, instead, of India and of a ride from a hotel to the airport, in that chaotic Indian traffic, which has a choreography and a hedging divinity 1 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of its own, where cows and people and smoke- belching vehicles engage in a ballet that against all the odds seems to work.

And she remembered, in the midst of her terror of collision, a woman running up to the white Ambassador car, her baby, a tiny scrap of humanity, in a dirty sling of rags on her hip, and clawing at the car window with a hand that was some sort of human claw; leprosy, perhaps, had done its work. And she had looked at the woman in horror, because that was what she felt and in the suddenness of the moment could not conceal. And then she had averted her eyes, as the woman trotted beside the slowly moving car, still scraping at the glass in desperate pleading. It had seemed to her that all of suffering humanity was outside that car door, all of it, and that if the car stopped it would sink and she would be consumed by it. Later still, in her airplane seat, with all the resources of jet fuel and technology to lift her out of teeming Bombay, she had thought of that poor woman and of the fact that she would be hungry, right now, unable to feed that tiny baby, and had she opened the window just a little and thrown out a few rupees she would have made life bearable for that woman for at least a couple of days. But she had not.

Begging, she realised, was one of those moral issues which she called intimate; they did not arise in the halls of academia so much as in the daily lives of people. These were the questions that reminded us we had a moral faculty, a conscience: What do we owe our friends? Do I need to be kinder? Am I being selfish?

Should I declare even that to the taxman? And to most of us, this was what moral philosophy was all about.

She looked at Grace, who was still expecting an answer to the question she had posed. “Well, all right,” said Isabel. “Perhaps I don’t need to feel bad about it. But you know how I tend T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N

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to think about these things too much. I know it’s a failing, but I can’t seem to help myself.”

Grace, who did not respond immediately, was studying Isabel carefully. She knew her employer well; rather better, in fact, than Isabel realised. And although she agreed with Isabel’s self-assessment of her tendency to conduct internal debates when others would simply make a decision and act, she was not sure that this was always a failing. Isabel talked about the good life and how we should try to lead it, and again Grace agreed with this. Isabel’s life was a good one; she was a kind woman, and she felt for people, which was more than one could say about a lot of people in her position, Grace thought. But there were certainly areas of Isabel’s life where what was required was a little less thought and a bit more action. Should she say something? Well, they had always spoken frankly to one another . . .

“Yes,” said Grace. “I know how you think about things. But there are some things that you shouldn’t think too much about.