“Oh, I suppose it has its moments,” he said. “You have to read 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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a lot. I sit at my desk and go through the financial press and company reports. I’m a sort of spy, really. I collect intelligence.”
“And is it a good place to work?” asked Isabel. “Are your colleagues agreeable people?”
Paul did not answer immediately. Lifting his glass, he took a long sip of his beer. When he answered, he looked down at the table as he spoke. “By and large, yes. By and large.”
“Which means no,” said Isabel.
“No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that . . . well, I lost somebody who worked for me. A few weeks ago. I have—had—two people under me in my department, and he was one of them.”
“He went elsewhere?” asked Isabel. “Lured away? I gather that everybody’s frantically busy headhunting everybody else.
Isn’t that the way it works?”
Paul shook his head. “He died,” he said. “Or rather, he was killed. In a fall.”
It could have been a climbing accident; those happened in the Highlands virtually every week. But it was not, and Isabel knew it.
“I think I know who it was,” she said. “Was it at—”
“The Usher Hall,” said Paul. “Yes. That was him. Mark Fraser.” He paused. “Did you know him?”
“No,” said Isabel. “But I saw it happen. I was there, in the grand circle, talking to a friend, and he came falling down, right past us, like a . . . like a . . .”
She stopped, and reached out to touch Paul’s arm. He was clutching his glass, staring down at the table, appalled by what she was saying.
C H A P T E R S I X
E
IT ALWAYS HAPPENED when one was in a room with smokers.
She remembered reading somewhere that the reason for it was that the surfaces of nonsmokers’ clothes were covered with negative ions, while tobacco smoke was full of positive ions. So when there was smoke in the air, it was immediately attracted to the oppositely charged surface, which made one’s clothes smell. And that was why, when she lifted up the jacket that she had been wearing the previous evening and which she had left lying across the top of her bedroom chair, she was assailed by the stale, acrid smell of tobacco smoke. There had been smokers in the Vincent Bar, as there always were in bars, and even though she and Paul had sat near the door, it had been enough to leave its mark.
Isabel gave the jacket a good shake before the open window, which always helped, before putting it away in the wardrobe. Then she returned to the window and looked out over the garden, to the trees beside her wall, the tall sycamore and the twin birches which moved so readily in the wind. Paul Hogg. It was a Borders name, and whenever she encountered it she thought of James Hogg, the writer known as the Ettrick Shepherd, the most distinguished of the Hoggs, although there were other, even English, Hoggs.
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Quintin Hogg, a lord chancellor (and perhaps slightly porcine in appearance, though, as she reminded herself, one should not be uncharitable to Hoggs), and his son, Douglas Hogg. And so on. All these Hoggs.
They had not stayed long in the bar. The recollection of Mark Fraser’s fall had visibly upset Paul, and although he had rapidly changed the subject, a shadow had fallen over their evening. But before they finished their drinks and went their separate ways, he had said something which had made her sit up sharply. “He would never have fallen. He had a head for heights, you see. He was a climber. I went with him up Buchaille Etive Mhor. He went straight up. An absolute head for heights.”
She had stopped him and asked him what he meant. If he would not have fallen, then had he deliberately jumped? Paul had shaken his head. “I doubt it. People surprise you, but I just cannot see why he would have done that. I spent hours with him earlier that day, hours, and he was not in the least bit down. Quite the opposite, in fact; one of the companies which he had drawn to our attention, and in which we had invested heavily, had come up with a spectacular set of interim results. The chairman had sent him a memo congratulating him on his perspicacity and he was very pleased with this. Smiling. Cat with the cream. Why would he do himself in?”
Paul had shaken his head, and then had changed the subject, leaving her to wonder. And now she was wondering again, as she went downstairs for breakfast. Grace had arrived early and had put on her egg to boil. There were comments on a story in the newspapers; a government minister had been evasive in parlia-mentary question time and had refused to give the information which the opposition had requested. Grace had put him down as a liar the first time she saw his photograph in the paper, and now 6 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h here was the proof. She looked at her employer, challenging her to deny the proposition, but Isabel just nodded.
“Shocking,” she said. “I can’t remember when exactly it was that it became all right to lie in public life. Can you remember?”
Grace could. “President Nixon started it. He lied and lied.
And then it came across the Atlantic and our people started to lie too. That’s how it started. Now it’s standard practise.”
Isabel had to agree. People had lost their moral compass, it seemed, and this was just a further example. Grace, of course, would never lie. She was completely honest, in small things and big, and Isabel trusted her implicitly. But then Grace was not a politician, and never could be one. The first lies, Isabel assumed, had to be told at the candidate selection board.
Of course, not all lies were wrong, which was another respect, Isabel thought, in which Kant was mistaken. One of the most ridiculous things that he had ever said was that there was a duty to tell the truth to the murderer looking for his victim. If the murderer came to one’s door and asked, Is he in? one would be obliged to answer truthfully, even if this would lead to the death of an innocent person. Such nonsense; and she could remember the precise offending passage: Truthfulness in statements which cannot be avoided is the formal duty of an individual to everyone, however great may be the disadvantage accruing to himself or to another. It was not surprising that Benjamin Constant should have been offended by this, although Kant responded—unconvincingly—
and tried to point out that the murderer might be apprehended before he acted on the knowledge which he had gained from a truthful answer.
The answer, surely, is that lying in general is wrong, but that some lies, carefully identified as the exception, will be permissible. There were, therefore, good lies and bad lies, with good lies 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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being uttered for a benevolent reason (to protect the feeling of another, for example). If somebody asked one’s opinion of a newly acquired—but tasteless—possession, for instance, and one gave an honest answer, then that could hurt feelings and deprive the other of the joy of ownership. So one lied, and praised it, which was surely the right thing to do. Or was it? Perhaps it was not as simple as that. If one became accustomed to lying in such circumstances, the line between truth and falsehood could become blurred.
Isabel thought that she might visit this issue in detail one day and write a paper on the subject. “In Praise of Hypocrisy” might be a suitable title, and the article might begin: “To call a person a hypocrite is usually to allege a moral failing. But is hypocrisy inevitably bad? Some hypocrites deserve greater consideration . . .”