“No. Probably not. It’s just that I feel a bit uneasy about it.”
Jamie said that he knew what she meant. “We’ll just have to see,” he said. “The important thing is that she didn’t seem too fazed by our getting engaged. That’s a relief, at least.”
Isabel was cautious. “Give her time,” she said. “Sometimes things take a bit of time to sink in.” She gave Jamie a look of caution. “One thing about Cat that we have to remember is that she’s unpredictable.” There was, of course, an inherent contradiction in that, she told herself. An unpredictable person could not be predicted to be unpredictable.
“The liar paradox,” she said.
Jamie, who was thinking of Cat’s unpredictability, looked perplexed. “What?”
“A Greek philosopher named Eubulides,” said Isabel. “He had a Cretan say,
Jamie looked bemused. “If I’m going to be married to a philosopher, I suppose I should start reading up on some philosophy.”
Isabel did not think this necessary. A couple did not have to know the same things; if she knew more about philosophy than Jamie did, then he knew more than she about history, and music, and a lot of other subjects. They were, she thought, just about equal.
“You don’t have to start reading philosophy,” said Isabel. “And I can’t see where you’d find the time. Remember what Wittgenstein said: one lesson in philosophy is about as useful as one lesson in playing the piano.”
“No use at all?”
“Well …,” Isabel mused. “Wittgenstein knew about playing the piano, of course. His brother was a very accomplished pianist—a one-armed pianist, as it happens. Composers wrote special one-handed pieces for him, but he could manage ordinary pieces too. Don’t you find that extraordinary?”
Jamie looked thoughtful. He was wondering how the bassoon might be adapted for a one-armed bassoonist—it would be difficult, if not impossible. It was hard enough to play the bassoon with two hands and if one could only use five fingers at any one time, then that would require foot-operated keys, perhaps, or levers that could be squeezed by knee pressure. No.
“You’re looking defeated,” said Isabel. “Was it the thought of a one-handed system for the bassoon?”
He gave her the look that he sometimes gave her when he felt she was reading his mind. “As it happens, yes.”
“Perhaps one will evolve,” said Isabel. “But talking of evolution, did you know that Charles Darwin mentioned the bassoon? He was fascinated with earthworms, who he said were indifferent to shouts and tobacco smoke and could not hear the bassoon.”
Jamie smiled, and filed the information away in his memory. One of his pupils, a particularly grubby small boy, might like to hear that. Now, though, he wanted to get back to the discussion of Cat’s tightrope walker, and Isabel was leading them into something quite different—as she often did. “But what’s the liar paradox got to do with Cat’s tightrope walker?”
“Nothing to do with him,” said Isabel. “But everything to do with her. I said that the one predictable thing about Cat is that she is unpredictable. But if that statement is true, then what I said about her unpredictability is untrue.”
“Oh.”
Isabel took Jamie’s arm. “You don’t have to bury yourself in philosophy. I can do enough philosophy for both of us.”
“And I can play enough music for two,” he said.
“Exactly.”
They walked on in silence, content with one another, each aware that this moment, like a number of others that they had experienced since the engagement, had a noumenal feel to it: there was a mystery to it, a sense of the sacred. For his part, Jamie felt that he was looking at the world differently, that quotidian and unexceptional surroundings now seemed charged with an excitement and a feeling of possibility.
No. That was not going to work. He muttered the words again, with Isabel listening; she loved these impromptu songs Jamie seemed to be able to summon up from somewhere within him, so effortlessly.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “And the tune?”
He hummed it first, without its words, and then sang it, softly, as they turned the corner into their road. Further down the pavement, a woman they both knew slightly, a neighbour from a few streets away, was walking her dog, a brindle greyhound. The dog looked up sharply, sniffing at the air, and Isabel knew at once that with its sharp hearing it had picked up Jamie’s song.
Jamie stopped. “I need to work on it a bit,” he said. “The trouble about writing songs is this: Who’s going to sing them?”
“You and I,” said Isabel. “And little Charlie when he’s a bit bigger. He’ll love that song about olives.”
“He’ll have forgotten about olives by then. He’ll want songs about trains and bears and so on,” said Jamie.
“You can write those too.”
