The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

“A waiting list?”

“Yes.”

A year of pain. That was what socialised medicine meant; sometimes pain had to be endured if nobody was to go without the basics.

“So you wanted to get it done privately? To pay for it?”

He nodded, and she watched him closely. He did not look away; his eyes moved slightly, the normal flicker of movement that comes with consciousness, but he did not look away.

“Do you know how much it costs?” she asked. “Do you know how much it costs to have it done at the Murrayfield Hospital? The surgeon’s fees? The anaesthetist? The physiotherapy, and so on?”

Now he looked away. “Five hundred,” he muttered. “Something like that.”

“Oh, Eddie…” She was about to say that five hundred pounds was not very much, but she realised in time that this was exactly what she should not say. So she said instead, “It’s much more expensive than that.”

He said nothing. He was fiddling with the strings of his apron, twisting them round a finger. She watched him for a moment, and then made her decision. “I can pay for this, you know. I can pay for the whole thing. I can do that for your father.”

Her words had an immediate effect. The twirling of the apron string stopped as Eddie froze. He did not move.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I can easily do it. You see, I have a special fund that allows me to do things like that. I give grants, or rather the lawyer gives them. We can do this very easily.”

“You can’t pay for other people’s operations,” said Eddie.

“Why not? If they need them. Why not?”

“Because it’s their own business.” It was crudely put, but she knew exactly what he meant. In philosophical terms she would have referred to it as individual autonomy, or the sphere of private decision. But what Eddie had said summed it up very well.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll keep out of it. But if you change your mind, then I’ll do it. You just let me know.”

She realised that she had said nothing about the return of the five hundred pounds. If that was not going to be anywhere near the sum required for the operation, then Eddie should surely offer to return it. Indeed, he had to return it. But he said nothing about it, and just turned away, to get on with his work. And that was the point at which she realised that the whole business about the father’s hip replacement was a complete lie.

It hurt her, being lied to by Eddie, and it made her reflect on why exactly it was that we were harmed by lies. Sometimes, of course, lies harmed us because we acted on them, and this proved to be to our detriment. That was straightforward and understandable. The person falsely directed onto the cliff path by the mischievous passerby is harmed by the lie when he falls over the edge. The fraudster’s victim is harmed when he sends money for the nonexistent benefit that will never materialise. He suffers loss. But what of other lies—lies which did not necessarily make us act to our disadvantage, nor took anything from us, but which just misled us? Why should we be hurt by them?

It is all because of trust, she decided. We trusted others to tell us the truth and were let down by their failure to do so. We were hoodwinked, shown to be credulous, which is all about loss of face. And then she decided that it was nothing to do with trust, or pride. It was something to do with the moral value of things as they really were. Truth was built into the world; it informed the laws of physics; truth was the world. And if we lied about something, we disrupted, destabilized that essential truth; a lie was wrong simply because it was that which was not. A lie was contra naturam. Truth was beauty, beauty truth. But was Keats right about that? If truth and beauty were one and the same thing, then why have two different terms to describe it? Ideas expressed in poetry could be beguiling, but philosophically misleading, even vacuous, like the rhetoric of politicians who uttered the most beautiful-sounding platitudes about scraps of dreams, scraps of ideas.

BUT BY FRIDAY she had stopped thinking about Eddie and the lies he had told her. Isabel had a way of protecting herself against the discomforts of the world: she could make a decision to put them out of her mind and then do precisely that; it was of limited effect—things denied have a habit of coming back eventually, but as a temporary expedient it was effective enough. So, by Thursday, she and Eddie had been perfectly easy with one another; he had stopped thinking about the five hundred pounds, and the lie, as had she. It was as if nothing had happened.

Friday morning was devoted to editorial tasks, as she had planned, but not before she had spent a couple of hours with Charlie down on the canal towpath, feeding the ducks. Charlie watched in fascination, pointing and squealing with delight as the ducks swam for the crumbs Isabel tossed in their direction. I’m casting bread upon the waters, she thought. And then? Such bread was meant to return tenfold, but that was the difference between a metaphor and life: metaphors did not work when acted out. In the world of metaphor, the bread returned; in the world of ducks, it was eaten.

They returned from the canal and Isabel handed Charlie over to Grace. This was one area where denial did not work: I am not giving him as much time as he deserves, she thought. He wants all my time, and I am not giving it to him. But I am simply a working mother, she told herself, no different from anybody who takes her child to a nursery while she goes off to the office or the shop, or wherever she works. I should not feel guilty. But she did.

Her standing in for Cat in the delicatessen meant that her Review work had piled up. And that, she thought, is no metaphor: the work indeed stood in piles on her desk. The next issue was almost ready to go off to the printer, but behind that there stood submissions for the issue after that, including Dove’s paper. Of the two articles for the next issue that still required her final attention, Isabel disposed of one within minutes; a few tiny points, mostly of a typographical nature, were dealt with and given the tick in green ink that Isabel used to show that it was finally ready. Then there was a piece by an American philosopher on the ethics of using traditional recipes from indigenous people (for want of a better term, thought Isabel: we are all indigenous to somewhere. She had never discovered anybody who was not). We took from people when we used their recipes, she wrote; we took their knowledge. It was not quite theft, but it was a taking. Isabel stopped reading and looked out of the window. Yes, but we were imitative creatures; we copied one another all the time, and it would be difficult to control such copying. But then she thought: Our drugs. We stop people from copying our drugs, even if they’re dying. That’s one sort of recipe we definitely do not share.