A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“That we don’t know. We can imagine. But we don’t know.”
And then Richard had said, “Of course, when I said that you could change, I should have said that there are some things you can’t change entirely. Your personality, for example, is something that is always there. Certainly after about the age of thirty.”
This had interested Isabel, because she thought that she had changed. The woman who had married John Liamor all those years ago, the young woman in Cambridge, her head turned by the cynical Irish historian with his unkempt good looks and his witty disparagements of what he called “the creaky gerontocracy” (by which he meant the University of Cambridge) and the “queerocracy” (by which he meant the Fellows of his College). That would be called homophobia now, but not then, when straight Irishmen could present themselves as victims, too, whose prejudices were beyond censure.
She had changed, because now she would see through John Liamor; and she had changed in other respects too. She had become more forgiving, more understanding of human weak-nesses than she had been in her twenties. And love, too, had become more important to her; not love in the erotic sense, which obeyed its own tides throughout life and could be as intense, as unreasonable in its demands, whatever age one was, but love in the sense of
“So there’s not much that we can do about that central bit of ourselves—the core?” she had asked. “Would you call it that—
the core?”
“A good enough name for it,” said Richard. “No, I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. The very deep bits of us, the real preferences, are there whether we like it or not. But 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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if these deep bits are not very pleasant we can keep them under control. We can adapt to them.” He laid a hand on the polished bonnet of the old car, gently, with fondness, as on a precious object. “And I suppose we can develop positive attitudes which mean that in our dealings with others, in our day-to-day lives, we behave a bit better.”
“And we would deserve credit for all the effort involved?”
Richard gave Isabel the answer she herself would have given. “Yes. A lot of credit.” He paused. “I had a patient once who had a problem.” He smiled. “Well, all my patients have a problem, I suppose, but this one had a particularly difficult problem. He was a liar. He just felt compelled to tell lies—
about all sorts of things. And he knew that it was wrong, and he had to fight with it every day. Life for him was one constant effort, but he managed to stop lying. And, do you know, I really admired that man. I really did.”
He was right, she thought. It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.
That was where credit was deserved.
Richard gestured that they should leave the motor house.
He wanted to show Isabel the dovecote, with its small, carefully wrought bricks, an eighteenth-century addition.
“That man, the liar, really liked monopole Burgundy,” he said as they walked out into the open air. “I remember that, for some reason. Monopole Burgundy from a single vineyard.” He looked at Isabel and smiled. “Or that’s what he told me.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” she said. And immediately she regretted saying this, because it made light of that man’s effort. So she quickly said that she was sure that he liked it.
Richard was uncertain. “He might have liked it,” he said.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h S H E WO R K E D O N T H E P R OO F S , her study door closed behind her. Grace seemed to be busy upstairs, as Isabel heard her foot-fall through the ceiling. Something was dropped at one point, and fell with a thud, which was followed by a silence. Isabel looked up at the ceiling, and waited until the footsteps continued so she knew that Grace was not lying unconscious under some piece of furniture. Grace shifted things, which were never in quite the right place for her. Wardrobes would inch across a room; chests of drawers cross the carpet; occasional tables disappear into corners. Isabel thought that it might be something to do with the principles of feng shui. Grace had an interest in these things, although she was reluctant to talk about them, fearing Isabel’s scepticism. “There are some things we can’t prove,” she had once said to Isabel. “But we know that they work. We just know it.” And this had been followed by a challenging look, which left Isabel feeling unable to defend the position of empiricism.
By lunchtime she had read and corrected almost half of the issue. Several of the authors’ footnotes had been mangled in the setting, with page numbers disappearing or inflating impossibly and requiring to be deflated. Page 1027 could not exist; page 127 could, or page 102 or 107. This involved bibliographic checking, which took time, and sometimes required getting back in touch with the author. That meant e-mails to people who might not answer them quickly, or at all. And that gave rise to the thought that an article on the ethics of e-mail would perhaps be a good idea. Do you have to answer every e-mail that you get? Is ignoring an electronic message as rude as looking straight through somebody who addresses a remark to you? And 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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what, she wondered, was a reasonable delay between getting a message and responding to it? One of her authors had sent her an enquiry only two hours after sending an initial e-mail.
