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NOTHING MORE ABOUT the incident appeared in what Isabel called the “lower papers” (well, they are, she would defend herself: look at their content); and what she referred to as the
“morally serious papers,” The Scotsman and The Herald, were also silent on the subject. For all Isabel knew, McManus might have found out no more, or if he had pieced together a few more scraps of detail, his editor could have deemed it to be too inconsequential to print. There was a limit to what one could make of a simple tragedy, even if it had occurred in unusual circumstances. She assumed that there would be a Fatal Accident Inquiry, which was always held when a death occurred in sudden or unexpected circumstances, and this might be reported when it took place. These were public hearings, before the local judge, the sheriff, and in most cases the proceedings were quick and conclusive. Factory accidents in which somebody was found to have forgotten that a wire was live; a misconnected carbon monoxide extractor; a shot-gun that was thought to be unloaded. It did not take too long to unravel the tragedy, and the sheriff would make his determination, as it was called, patiently listing what had gone wrong and what needed to be put right, warning sometimes, but for the most T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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part not passing much comment. And then the court would move on to the next death, and the relatives of the last would make their way out onto the street in sad little knots of regret. The most likely conclusion in this case would be that an accident had occurred.
Because it had taken place so publicly, there might be comments on safety, and the sheriff could suggest a higher rail in the gods.
But it could be months before any of this happened, and by then, she hoped, she might have forgotten it.
She might have discussed it again with Grace, but her housekeeper, it appeared, had other things on her mind. A friend was experiencing a crisis and Grace was lending moral support. It was a matter of masculine bad behaviour, she explained; her friend’s husband was going though a midlife crisis and his wife, Grace’s friend, was at her wit’s end.
“He’s bought an entire new wardrobe,” Grace explained, casting her eyes upwards.
“Perhaps he feels like a change of clothing,” ventured Isabel.
“I’ve done that myself once or twice.”
Grace shook her head. “He’s bought teenage clothes,” she said. “Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. That sort of thing. And he’s walking around listening to rock music. He goes to clubs.”
“Oh,” said Isabel. Clubs sounded ominous. “What age is he?”
“Forty-five. A very dangerous age for men, we’re told.”
Isabel thought for a moment. What might one do in such a case?
Grace supplied her answer. “I laughed at him,” she said. “I came straight out and said he looked ridiculous. I told him that he had no business wearing teenage boys’ clothing.”
Isabel could picture it. “And?”
“He told me to mind my own business,” Grace said indig-5 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h nantly. “He said that, just because I was past it, he was not. So I said, past what? And he didn’t reply.”
“Trying,” said Isabel.
“Poor Maggie,” Grace went on. “He goes off to these clubs and never takes her, not that she would want to go anyway. She sits at home and worries about what he’s getting up to. But there’s not much I can do. I did give him a book, though.”
“And what was that?”
“It was a dog-eared old book. I found it in a bookshop in the West Port. One Hundred Things for a Teenage Boy to Do. He didn’t think it funny.”
Isabel burst out laughing. Grace was direct, which came, she imagined, from being brought up in a small flat off the Cowgate, a home in which there was no time for much except work, and where people spoke their minds. Isabel was conscious of how far Grace’s experience had been from her own; she had enjoyed all the privileges; she had had every chance educationally, while Grace had been obliged to make do with what was available at an indifferent and crowded school. It sometimes seemed to Isabel as if her education had brought her doubt and uncertainty, while Grace had been confirmed in the values of traditional Edinburgh.
There was no room for doubt there; which had made Isabel wonder, Who is happier, those who are aware, and doubt, or those who are sure of what they believe in, and have never doubted or questioned it? The answer, she had concluded, was that this had nothing to do with happiness, which came upon you like the weather, determined by your personality.
“My friend Maggie,” Grace announced, “thinks that you can’t be happy without a man. And this is what makes her so concerned about Bill and his teenage clothes. If he goes off with a younger woman, then there’ll be nothing left for her, nothing.”
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“You should tell her,” said Isabel. “You should tell her that you don’t need a man.”
She made this remark without thinking how Grace might interpret it, and it suddenly occurred to her that Grace might think that this was Isabel suggesting that Grace was a confirmed spinster, who had no chance of finding a man.
“What I meant to say,” Isabel began, “was that one doesn’t need—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Grace interjected. “I know what you meant.”
Isabel glanced at her quickly and then continued, “I’m not one to talk about men, anyway. I wasn’t conspicuously successful myself.”
But why? she wondered. Why had she been unsuccessful?
Wrong man, or wrong time, or both?
Grace looked at her quizzically. “What happened to him, that man of yours? John what’s-his-name? That Irishman? You’ve never really told me.”
“He was unfaithful,” said Isabel, simply. “All the time when we lived in Cambridge. And then, when we went to Cornell and I was on my fellowship there, he suddenly announced that he was going off to California with another woman, a girl really, and that was it. He just left in the space of one day.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes, just like that. America went to his head. He said that it freed him up. I’ve heard that normally cautious people can go quite mad there, just from feeling free of whatever it was that was holding them back at home. He was like that. He drank more, he had more girlfriends, and he was more impetuous.”
Grace digested this. Then she asked, “He’s still there, I suppose?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel shrugged. “I assume so. But I imagine that he’s with somebody else by now. I don’t know.”
“But would you like to find out?”
The answer was that of course she would. Because against all reason, against all personal conviction, she would forgive him if he came back and asked her for forgiveness, which he would never do, of course. And that made her safe from this weakness; the fact that never again would she be bewitched by John Liamor, never again would she be in that particular and profound danger.
S H E WA S O N H E R WAY to forgetting the Usher Hall incident two weeks later when she was invited to a party at a gallery to mark the opening of a show. Isabel bought paintings, and this meant that a steady stream of gallery invitations came into the house. For the most part she avoided the openings, which were cramped and noisy affairs, riddled with pretension, but when she knew that there would be strong interest in the paintings on display she might go to the opening—and arrive early, in order to see the work before rival red dots appeared underneath the labels.