The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

palaestra; this was Scotland, where it was simply too cold to do as in Sparta, no matter how classically minded one might be.

Whatever it was that prompted Jamie, he suddenly remarked: “What would it be like not to be able to go out in case people recognised you? What if you had done something so…so appalling that you couldn’t face people?”

Isabel glanced at him. “You haven’t, have you?”

He smiled. “Not yet.”

She looked up at the skyline, at the conical towers of the old Infirmary, at the crouching lion of Arthur’s Seat in the distance, beyond a line of trees. “Some who have done dreadful things don’t feel it at all,” she said. “They have no sense of shame. And maybe that’s why they did it in the first place. They don’t care what others think of them.”

Jamie thought about this for a moment. “But there are plenty of others, aren’t there? People who have done something out of character. People who have a conscience and who yet suddenly have given in to passing temptation. Some dark urge. They must feel ashamed of themselves, don’t you think?”

Isabel agreed. “Yes, they must. And I feel so sorry for them.” It had always struck her as wrong that we should judge ourselves—or, more usually, others—by single acts, as if a single snapshot said anything about what a person had been like over the whole course of his life. It could say something, of course, but only if it was typical of how that person behaved; otherwise, no, all it said was that at that moment, in those particular circumstances, temptation won a local victory.

They walked on in silence. Then Isabel said, “And what about being made to feel ashamed of what you are? About being who you are.”

“But do people feel that?”

Isabel thought that they did. “Plenty of people feel ashamed of being poor,” she said. “They shouldn’t, but many do. Then some feel ashamed of being a different colour from those around them. Again, they shouldn’t. And others feel ashamed of not being beautiful, of having the wrong sort of chin. Of having the wrong number of chins. All of these things.”

“It’s ridiculous.”

“Of course it is.” Jamie, she realised, could say that; the blessed do not care from what angle they are regarded, as Auden…She stopped herself, and thought instead of moral progress, of how much worse it had been only a few decades ago. Things had changed for the better: now people asserted their identities with pride; they would not be cowed into shame. Yet so many lives had been wasted, had been ruined, because of unnecessary shame.

She remembered a friend’s mother who had discovered, at the age of twelve, that she was illegitimate, that the father who had been said to have been killed in an accident was simply not there, a passing, regretted dalliance that had resulted in her birth. Today that meant very little, when vast cohorts of children sprang forth from maternity hospitals without fathers who had signed up to anything, but for that woman, Isabel had been told, the rest of her life, from twelve onwards, was to be spent in shame. And with that shame there came the fear that others would find out about her illegitimacy, would stumble upon her secret. Stolen lives, Isabel thought, lives from which the joy had been extracted; and yet we could not banish shame altogether—she herself had written that in one of her editorials in the Review of Applied Ethics, in a special issue on the emotions. Without shame, guilt became a toothless thing, a prosecutor with no penalties up his sleeve.

They were on their way to a dinner party, and had decided to walk rather than call a taxi, since the evening was so inviting. Their host lived in Ramsay Garden, a cluster of flats clinging to the edge of the Castle Rock like an impossible set constructed by some operatic visionary and then left for real people to move into. From the shared courtyard below, several cream-harled buildings, with tagged-on staircases and balconies, grew higgledy-piggledy skywards, their scale and style an odd mixture of Arts and Crafts and Scottish baronial. It was an expensive place to live, much sought-after for the views which the flats commanded over Princes Street and the Georgian New Town beyond.

She had told Jamie who their hosts were, but he had forgotten, and he asked her again as they climbed the winding stairway to the topmost flat. She found herself thinking: Like all men, he does not listen. Men switch off and let you talk, but all the time something else is going on in their minds.

“Fleurs-de-lis,” said Isabel, running her hand along the raised plaster motifs on the wall of the stairway. “Who are they? People I don’t know very well. And I think that I owe them, anyway. I was here for dinner three years ago, if I remember correctly. And I never invited them back. I meant to, but didn’t. You know how it is.”

She smiled at herself for using the excuse You know how it is. It was such a convenient, all-purpose excuse that one could tag it on to just about anything. And what did it say? That one was human, and that one should be forgiven on those grounds? Or that the sheer weight of circumstances sometimes made it difficult to live up to what one expected of oneself? It was such a flexible excuse, and one might use it for the trivial or the not so trivial. Napoleon, for instance, might say, Yes, I did invade Russia; I’m so sorry, but you know how it is.

Jamie ended her reverie. “They’ve forgiven you,” he said. “Or they weren’t counting.”

“Do you have to invite people back?” Isabel asked. “Is it wrong to accept an invitation if you know that you won’t reciprocate?”

Jamie ran his finger across the fleurs-de-lis. “But you haven’t told me who they are.”

“I was at school with her,” said Isabel. “She was very quiet. People laughed at her a bit—you know how children are. She had an unfortunate nickname.”

“Which was?”

Isabel shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jamie, I shouldn’t tell you.” That was how nicknames were perpetuated; how her friend Sloppy Duncan was still Sloppy Duncan thirty years after the name was first minted.

Jamie shrugged. “What are their real names then? I need to know those.”

“Colin and Marjorie. And their surname is MacDonald. He’s some sort of lawyer. Intellectual property, I think. And she…well, I don’t think that she does anything, or anything for which she gets paid. She volunteers a lot. And she’s very active with a domestic violence shelter that looks after women who flee abusive men. She’s always busy.”

“Why have they invited us?” asked Jamie.