Isabel bent to speak into the tiny microphone on the intercom box. She gave her name and explained that she would like to speak to Miss Duffus. It was in connection with the accident, she added.
There was a brief pause, and then the buzzer sounded. Isabel pushed the door open and began to climb up the stairs, noting that stale, slightly dusty smell which seemed to hang in the air of so many common stairs. It was the smell of stone which has been wet and now has dried, coupled with the slight odour of cooking that would waft out of individual flats. It was a smell that reminded her of childhood, when she had gone every week up such a stairway to her piano lessons at the house of Miss Marilyn McGibbon—Miss McGibbon, who had referred to music which starred her; which meant she was stirred. Isabel still thought of starring music.
She paused, and stood still for a moment, remembering Miss McGibbon, whom she had liked as a child, but from whom she had picked up, even as a child, a sense of sadness, of something unresolved. Once she had arrived for her lesson and had found her red-eyed, with marks of tears on the powder which she applied to her face, and had stared at her mutely until Miss McGibbon had turned away, mumbling: “I am not myself. I apologise. I am not myself this afternoon.”
And Isabel had said: “Has something sad happened?”
Miss McGibbon had started to say yes, but had changed it to 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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no, and had shaken her head, and they had turned to the scales which Isabel had learned and to Mozart, and nothing more had been said. Later, as a young adult, she had learned quite by chance that Miss McGibbon had lost her friend and companion, one Lalla Gordon, the daughter of a judge of the Court of Session, who had been forced to choose between her family (who disapproved of Miss McGibbon) and her friendship, and who had chosen the former.
T H E F L AT WA S O N the fourth floor and by the time that Isabel had reached the landing, the door was already slightly ajar. A young woman was standing just within the hall, and she opened the door as Isabel approached. Isabel smiled at her, taking in at a glance Hen Duffus’s appearance: tall, almost willowy, and wide-eyed in that appealing, doelike way which Isabel always associated with girls from the west coast of Scotland, but which presumably had nothing to do with that at all. Her smile was returned as Hen asked her to come in. Yes, Isabel thought as she heard the accent: the west, although not Glasgow, as Cat had said, but somewhere small and couthy, Dunbarton perhaps, Helens-burgh at a stretch. But she was definitely not a Henrietta; Hen, yes; that was far more suitable.
“I’m sorry to come unannounced. I hoped I might just find you in. You and . . .”
“Neil. I don’t think he’s in. But he should be back soon.”
Hen closed the door behind them and pointed to a door down the hallway. “We can go through there,” she said. “It’s the usual mess, I’m afraid.”
“No need to apologise,” said Isabel. “We all live in a mess. It’s more comfortable that way.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“I’d like to be tidy,” said Hen. “I try, but I guess you can’t be what you aren’t.”
Isabel smiled, but said nothing. There was a physicality about this woman, an air of . . . well, sexual energy. It was unmistak-able, like musicality, or asceticism. She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
The living room, into which Hen led Isabel, looked out to the north, over the trees that lined the southern edge of the Meadows. The windows, which were generous Victorian, must have flooded the room with light in the day; even now, in the early evening, the room needed no lights. Isabel crossed the room to stand before one of the windows. She looked down. Below them on the cobbled street, a boy dragged a reluctant dog on a lead.
The boy bent down and struck the dog on the back, and the animal turned round in self-defence. Then the boy kicked it in the ribs and dragged on the lead again.
Hen joined her at the window and looked down too. “He’s a wee brat, that boy. I call him Soapy Soutar. He lives in the ground-floor flat with his mother and a bidie-in. I don’t think that dog likes any of them.”
Isabel laughed. She appreciated the reference to Soapy Soutar; every Scottish child used to know about Oor Wullie and his friends Soapy Soutar and Fat Boab, but did they now? Where do the images of Scottish childhood come from now? Not, she thought, from the streets of Dundee, those warm, mythical streets which the Sunday Post peopled with pawky innocents.
They turned away from the window and Hen looked at Isabel.
“Why have you come to see us? You aren’t a journalist, are you?”
Isabel shook her head vigorously. “Certainly not. No, I was a witness. I saw it happen.”
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Hen stared at her. “You were there? You saw Mark fall?”
“I’m afraid I did.”
Hen looked behind her for a seat and sat down. She looked down at the floor, and for a moment she said nothing. Then she raised her eyes. “I don’t really like to think of it, you know. It’s only a few weeks, and I’m already trying to forget about it. But it’s not easy, when you lose a flatmate like that.”
“Of course. I can understand.”
“We had the police round, you know. They came and asked about Mark. Then we had his parents, to come and take his things away. You can imagine what that was like.”
“Yes I can.”
“And there were other people,” Hen went on. “Mark’s friends. Somebody from his office. It went on and on.”
Isabel sat down on the sofa, next to Hen. “And now me. I’m sorry to intrude. I can imagine what all this is like.”
“Why did you come?” asked Hen. It was not said in an unfriendly way, but there was an edge to the question that Isabel picked up. It was exhaustion perhaps; exhaustion in the face of another interrogation.
“I had no real reason,” Isabel said quietly. “I suppose it’s because I was involved in it and I had nobody to talk to about it—
nobody connected with it, if you see what I mean. I saw this thing happen—this horrible thing—and I knew nobody who knew anything about him, about Mark.” She paused. Hen was watching her with her wide almond eyes. Isabel believed what she was saying, but was it the whole truth? And yet she could hardly tell these people that the reason why she was here was sheer curiosity about what happened; that, and a vague suspicion that there was something more to the incident.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Hen closed her eyes, then nodded. “I understand,” she said.
“That’s fine with me. In a way I’d like to hear about what actually happened. I’ve imagined it enough.”
“You don’t mind then?”
“No, I don’t mind. If it’s going to help you, then that’s all right with me.” She reached out and touched Isabel’s arm. The sympathetic gesture was unexpected, and Isabel felt—unworthily, she thought—that it was out of character. “I’ll make some coffee,”
Hen went on, rising to her feet. “Then we can talk.”
Hen left the room, and Isabel leant back into the sofa and looked about her. It was well furnished, unlike many rented flats, which quickly develop a well-used look. There were prints on the wall—the landlord’s taste, presumably mixed with that of the tenants: a view of the Falls of Clyde (landlord); A Bigger Splash, by Hockney, and Amateur Philosophers, by Vettriano (tenants); and Iona, by Peploe (landlord). She smiled at the Vettriano—he was deeply disapproved of by the artistic establishment in Edinburgh, but he remained resolutely popular. Why was this? Because his figurative paintings said something about people’s lives (at least about the lives of people who danced on the beach in formal clothing); they had a narrative in the same way in which Edward Hopper’s paintings did. That was why there were so many poems inspired by Hopper; it was because there was a now-read-on note to everything he painted. Why are the people there? What are they thinking of ? What are they going to do now? Hockney, of course, left nothing unanswered. It was very clear what everybody was about in a Hockney picture: swimming, and sex, and narcissism. Had Hockney drawn WHA? She remembered that he had; and he had captured rather well the geological catastro-phe that was WHA’s face. I am like a map of Iceland. Had he said that? She thought not, but he could have. She would write a book T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B