“I’ll take your cup,” said Hen suddenly, rising to her feet. “I have to get something going in the kitchen. Excuse me a minute.”
“I must go,” said Isabel, but she remained on the sofa when Hen had gone out of the room, and she looked at Neil, who was watching her, his hands resting loosely on the arms of the chair.
“Do you think that he jumped?” Isabel asked.
His face was impassive, but there was something disconcert-ing in his manner, an uneasiness. “Jumped?”
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“Committed suicide?”
Neil opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it again. He stared at Isabel.
“I’m sorry to ask you that,” she went on. “I can see that you think the answer is no. Well, you’re probably right.”
“Probably,” he said quietly.
“May I ask you another thing?” she said, and then, before her question could be answered, “Hen said that Mark was popular.
But might there have been anybody who disliked him?”
The question had been uttered, and now she watched him. She saw his eyes move, to look down at the floor, and then up again.
When he answered he did not look at her, but stared out the door, into the hall, as if to look for Hen to answer the question for him.
“I don’t think so. No. I don’t think so.”
Isabel nodded. “So there really was nothing . . . nothing unusual in his life?”
“No. Nothing unusual.”
He looked at her now, and she saw in his eyes a look of dislike. He felt—and who could blame him for this?—that it was none of her business to go prying into his friend’s life. She had clearly outstayed her welcome, as Hen had made apparent, and now she would have to leave. She rose to her feet, and he followed her example.
“I’d just like to say good-bye to Hen,” she said, moving into the hall, followed by Neil. She looked about her quickly. The door out of which he had darted when she had by chance looked into the mirror must be the door immediately to her right.
“She’s in the kitchen, isn’t she?” she said, turning and pushing open the door.
“That’s not it,” he called after her. “That’s Hen’s room.”
9 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h But Isabel had taken a step forward and saw the large bedroom, with its bedside lamp on and its closed curtain, and the unmade bed.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“The kitchen’s over here,” he said sharply. “That door there.”
He looked at her sideways. He was nervous, she thought; nervous and hostile.
She withdrew, and walked over to the door which he had indicated. She found Hen, who was embarrassed to be seen sitting on a stool reading a magazine. But she thanked her profusely, and said good-bye, and then left the flat, to the sound of Neil locking the door behind her. She had left them her card, and had said that they could contact her if they ever wanted to, but they had looked at it doubtfully, and she knew that they would not. She had felt awkward and foolish, which, she now thought, was how she deserved to feel. But at least something had become clear.
Hen and Neil were lovers, which was why he had been in her room when she had rung the bell downstairs. Hen had told her that Neil was not yet home, but then she could hardly have explained to her, a complete stranger, that he was in her bed, and at that hour. Of course this vindicated her instinct about Hen, but it had little bearing on her knowledge of how they had lived together, the three of them. It could be, of course, that Mark had felt excluded. Hen implied that she had not known the other two when she first moved into the flat, and this meant that at some point the relationship had become one of more intimate cohabitation. This might have changed the dynamics of their communal life, from a community of three friends to one of a couple and a friend. Alternatively, it was possible that Hen and Neil had fallen into each other’s arms after Mark’s death, for comfort and solace in their shared sorrow, perhaps. She could imagine that this 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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might have been the case, but again it made no difference to her understanding of what might have been going through Mark’s head on that evening at the Usher Hall. If she had known him hardly at all before she called on the flat in Warrender Park Terrace, she did not know him any better now. He had been a pleasant young man, popular and not given to self-doubt; no surprise, perhaps, as self-doubt is the territory of the teenager and, much later, of the failing, not of young men in their twenties. If he had been concerned about something, then his concern must have been hidden from those who were closest to him in his daily life.
She walked home slowly. It was a warm evening for the time of year, an evening that had in it just the smallest hint of summer, and there were others making their way home too. Most of them had people to go to, husbands, wives, lovers, parents. Her house awaited her, large and empty, which she knew was the result of choices she had made, but which perhaps were not entirely to be laid at her door. She had not deliberately chosen to fall in love so completely, and so finally, that thereafter no other man would have done. That was something which had happened to her, and the things that happen to us are not always of our making. John Liamor happened, and that meant that she lived with a sentence.
She did not ponder it unduly, nor speak to others of it (although she had spoken to Jamie, unwisely perhaps, the previous evening). It was just how things were, and she made the most of it, which was the moral duty which she thought that all of us had, at least if one believed in duties to self, which she did. If x, then y.
But y?
C H A P T E R N I N E
E
THE FOLLOWING WEEK was uneventful. There was a small amount of work to be done for the review, but with the proofs of the next issue recently sent off to the printers, and with two members of the editorial board out of the country, Isabel was hardly overburdened. She spent much of the time reading, and she also helped Grace in a long-overdue clearing of the attic. But there was still time for thought, and she could not help but return to what she now thought of as the event. The feeling of rawness which had followed that evening was certainly fading, but this now seemed to be replaced by a sense of lack of resolution. Her meeting with Hen and Neil had been unsatisfactory, she decided, and now she was left with nothing more that she could do. There was to be a Fatal Accident Inquiry; she had been informed by the procurator fiscal of the date when this would be held and had been told that as the most immediate witness she would be called to give evidence, but the fiscal had implied that it would be an open-and-shut case.
“I don’t think that there’s much doubt,” he said. “We’ve had evidence that the height of the rail is perfectly adequate and that the only way in which somebody could fall over would be by leanT 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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ing right over. He must have done that, for whatever reason—
perhaps to see if he could see somebody downstairs. So that will be more or less that.”
“Then why hold an enquiry?” she had asked, sitting before the fiscal’s desk in his sparsely furnished office. He had asked her in for an interview, and she had found him in an office marked Deaths, a tall man with a gaunt, unhappy face. On the wall behind him there was a framed photograph. Two young men and two young women sat stiffly in chairs in front of a stone archway: University of Edinburgh, Law Society Committee, read the printed inscription below. One of them was the fiscal, recognisable in his lanky awkwardness. Had he hoped for, or expected, more than this job?