The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

to keep him busy while Isabel, from her corner of the blanket, contemplated her response to Dove.

The previous day she had received the second report on Dove’s article from a professor of philosophy in Glasgow. “Not the best paper I have ever read,” wrote the professor. “The author tries his best to extract further mileage from a trolley ride that is, in my view, already far too complicated. How that trolley, burdened as it is with such a weight of philosophical commentary, even manages to leave its depot, defeats me. Its journey should be terminated.” The verdict was put politely, but it was clearly a negative one. Two-nil against Dove, thought Isabel.

SHE WOULD HAVE to reject Dove’s paper. She had reached this position by asking herself what she would have done had the paper been from somebody whom she did not know. Her procedure in such a case would be to follow the recommendations of the reviewers, and she had now had two votes for rejection. If she ignored these—with a view to avoiding recriminations from Dove—then by that very act she would be doing an injustice to all those others whom she had rejected on the basis of bad reports. Every one of them would have dealt with her on an implicit understanding that there were procedures for the acceptance of papers that were consistently applied. She would be breaking faith with them if she did anything but that; it was simply not an option.

Now she mentally composed the letter she would write. The first hurdle was the second word. Dear Christopher was one option; Dear Professor Dove was another; the difference between the two was obvious, and represented the difference between friendship and acquaintance. Another option altogether was Dear Dove; an old-fashioned mode of address that had virtually died out but which was still used here and there by older scholars. In Isabel’s mouth the surname on its own would sound strange, and she could not bring herself to call him Christopher. So it was Dear Professor Dove, and with that resolved, the rest proved easy:

It was most thoughtful of you to offer me this excellent piece on the Trolley Problem. How these old problems still provide us with fresh food for thought! That is what I thought, at least, but then quot homines tot sententiae! (as I’m sure you will agree), and my view was not shared, alas, by the reviewers (two of them) who felt that your piece was not sufficiently original or insightful to merit publication. I was astonished, but I felt that I really had to abide by their decision, as not to do so would be unfair to those other authors (of similarly eminently publishable pieces) who have been turned down on the grounds of referees’ reports. Of course, these things are subjective, as is shown by the fact that you have had other offers to publish this piece. I believe that you should take those, and that is why I am writing to you so soon after receiving the unfavourable reports. I would not wish to hold you back from anxious publishers elsewhere. I shall certainly look out for the article’s appearance in the United States—you forgot to tell me, by the way, exactly who has offered for it; I assume that it’s the American Philosophical Quarterly or Ethics—somebody of that order. But wherever it ends up, I am sure that it will attract the attention it deserves. Yours sincerely, Isabel Dalhousie.

The plotting of the letter was a delicious pleasure, particularly the phrase it will attract the attention it deserves. That meant everything, or nothing, the implication in this case, if Dove was capable of reading between the lines, being nothing. She looked at Charlie, who was still staring at the bees, and then she stopped herself; the contemplation of Dove’s discomfiture gave pleasure, but it was not a pleasure that she could allow herself. We have a moral duty to forgive; she knew that. To forgive Christopher Dove, who had attempted to engineer a coup against her in the Review, to throw her out of her editorial chair? Who blatantly lied to her about his article being accepted for publication elsewhere? Yes. Even Dove.

So she decided the letter would be brief and to the point:

Dear Christopher Dove [a compromise], I’m so sorry that we shall not be able to publish your paper. I have taken two referees’ opinions—in accordance with normal practice—and I’m afraid that both were against publication. I’m sure that the paper has many merits and will find a home elsewhere. Yours sincerely, Isabel Dalhousie.

“Letters with moral merit,” she said to Charlie, “are often very dull. Humour, Charlie, usually needs a victim.”

Charlie, hearing this gurgling sound from his mother, turned and looked at her briefly before returning to his scrutiny of the bees.

“You’re very wise, Charlie,” Isabel continued. “Bees are such interesting creatures, with all their intense activity. They have so few doubts. Look at them. They are so thoroughly accepting of their place in the bee order. Workers. Queen. It’s interesting, Charlie, that the queen is the boss. Always a female bee. A model for matriarchies everywhere.”

“Exactly,” a voice said. “Exactly.”

Isabel looked up. Cat was standing immediately behind her. “You’re back!”

Cat looked down on them. “Does Charlie agree with you all the time?”

Isabel laughed. “You are meant to talk to them, you know,” she said. “Even if they don’t understand.”

And if you did not? she wondered. She had heard a depressing talk on the radio which revealed that many children these days learned language not from their parents, who barely spoke to them, but from the television. So a child’s first words might be, “Here is the news…”

Cat walked across the blanket, bent down, and tickled Charlie under the chin. But she did not kiss him. “Yes, you should talk to them. But surely you should say something they understand.”

“Remember James the Fourth,” said Isabel. “He thought that if children heard nothing at all, no language, then they would naturally speak Hebrew. He thought it the natural language.”

Cat made a noncommittal sound—possibly Hebrew.

“And, as you know,” Isabel went on, “he put a baby out on one of those islands in the Forth—just out there— with a dumb woman to look after him. The king of Scotland’s big experiment—to see if the boy would speak Hebrew.”

“How cruel,” said Cat. She did not sound interested.

Isabel shot a glance at her niece. It seemed inconceivable to her, not to be intrigued by the world. But Cat really was not. She related only to those things that impinged upon her immediate life, Isabel thought. The delicatessen. Men. What else? “I suppose I was really talking to myself,” said Isabel. “You know how people do that. They talk at great length to their cat or dog, but it’s merely a way of talking to themselves.”

It was as if Cat had not heard what Isabel said. She sat down on the blanket and turned to look at Charlie. “Bees, Charlie. Those are bees. Bees.”

“I already told him that,” said Isabel. “Charlie does not need people to repeat things to him.” She looked appraisingly at Cat, who had caught the sun in Sri Lanka—not badly, but it had been there, across her face.

“The sun signs his presence,” muttered Isabel.