Nick mumbled something that she did not hear, and moved off in the opposite direction. She watched him for a moment and felt, almost immediately, a strong sense of regret. Nick Smart was an unhappy man—that was apparent. He was, she imagined, lonely; living in a strange city where he had no past, no links, could not be easy. And she had allowed a visceral dislike to overcome her sense of what she should do, which was to forgive him his condescension, his egregious elegance, and at least say something kind to him, which she had not done. She stopped and turned round. He was walking up one side of George Square, along the edge of the gardens in the centre. He was looking at the ground, his head sunk.
Isabel hesitated. It was wrong, she knew, quite wrong, to allow gratuitous bad feeling to exist between oneself and another. She should run after him; she should apologise; she should try to restore courteous relations between them. She stood still; by now Nick Smart was almost at the top of the square, and in a few moments he walked off to the right and disappeared. It would have been easy, but now it was too late—taking a few steps to apologise was one thing, running after somebody was another, or seemed to be another; it was as if by turning the corner he had walked out of the circle of her moral concern. She turned away and began to walk home. It was as good an illustration as any, she thought, of the proposition that we forget about those who are distant from us, whom we cannot see—the starving in some far-off land, the oppressed whose suffering is known only by vague report, the man who has walked round a corner. I have broken relations with him, she said to herself, and as she thought this she was reminded of a curious habit she had had as a young girl. If ever she said something uncharitable to another, she would ask herself,
The childish trick worked in exactly the way it always did. She felt guilty; she regretted her lack of charity. Nick Smart was a stranger, far from home, and she had not comforted him.
“But why should I?” she asked herself.
“Because he is your moral neighbour,” a voice within her said. “Because you came into contact with him; that was all. But it was enough to make you behave towards him with decency, which you did not do because you are jealous and possessive.”
The branches of the trees moved gently, nudged by a wind that Isabel barely felt.
“Am I?” she asked the voice.
“Oh yes,” it replied. “Very.”
Conscience, she thought, walks with us; an unobtrusive companion, unseen, perhaps, but still audible.
LATER, released from the postlecture reception, Edward Mendelson made his way up to Isabel’s house for dinner. Jamie was busy putting Charlie to bed when he arrived, and so Isabel entertained him herself in the ground-floor drawing room.
“It’s just us,” she explained. “You said that you didn’t want me to have a large dinner party. So it’s just Jamie, you, and me.”
“Exactly what I wanted,” he said. And then, “Jamie…I don’t believe that I’ve met him.”
“You haven’t,” said Isabel. “When were you last in Edinburgh? Five years ago?”
“About that. He’s…” The question went unfinished.
“My boyfriend,” said Isabel. “Actually a bit more than that. We have a child together. A little boy.”
Edward Mendelson inclined his head in congratulation. “I’m delighted.”
Isabel poured them both a glass of wine, and for the next few minutes they discussed the lecture. Then Jamie appeared. He looked happy, thought Isabel; relaxed and happy. Charlie, it seemed, had that effect on him; and perhaps Charlie would grow up to be one of those people who made others happy just to be in his company. And would Charlie look like Jamie, she wondered, or be a male version of me? That one could not imagine, she decided; none of us could see ourselves as the opposite sex. Of course he might look like neither, as children often did; confounding recent genes in favour of ancient ones.
The conversation flowed easily. Jamie asked about a production at the Met that he had read about in the papers; Edward Mendelson had seen it, and thought highly of it.
“Auden had to live near a good opera house, didn’t he?” said Isabel.
“Yes, which is why Kirchstetten suited him. It’s only forty miles or so from Vienna.”
Isabel was silent. She knew that Edward Mendelson had been at the funeral in Kirchstetten; that he had been there when they played Siegfried’s Funeral March on a gramophone and then carried the poet from his house and the local brass band had struck up and accompanied the cortege through the streets of the village that had been so proud of the Herr Professor. She wanted to ask,
They talked about the lecture.
“Just where is the line between a rational sense of guilt,” Isabel asked, “and a neurotic one?”
“In a difficult place, I expect,” said Edward Mendelson. “These lines are often fine.”
“But you can tell when somebody’s crossed that line,” said Jamie.
Isabel was interested. She was thinking of Marcus. There was no reason for him to feel guilty, if Stella’s view was correct, and yet he felt shame—that was obvious enough. So that was a case of shame following upon guilt which other people thought should be there, but which was not. You cannot feel guilty about a wrong which you simply did not do. She looked at Jamie. “Can you tell?”
Jamie reached for the water jug. “Yes. I knew somebody at music college who felt perpetually guilty about the smallest things. He had been to one of those Catholic boarding schools and had been made to think about the implications for his soul of the very smallest things. His thoughts, for example. He felt guilty about his thoughts. All the time.”
Isabel knew what Jamie meant. So am I neurotic? she wondered. She thought uncharitable thoughts—about Dove, for example. Should she feel guilty about that? At the height of his plot against her, she had imagined Dove
