Was his life warth livin? Ay / siccar it was. / He was eident, he was blye / in Scotland’s cause. Just as John had been. Scotland’s cause: Be Kind.
Toby had slowed down now, and was almost strolling. Isabel was concerned that he might turn round at any point, and in this much smaller street, he could hardly fail to notice her. Of course, 1 0 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that need not be unduly embarrassing; there was no reason why she should not be walking down this particular street on a Saturday afternoon, just as he was doing. The only difference between them, she thought, was that he was clearly going somewhere and she had no idea where she would end up.
At the eastern end of Northumberland Street the road took a sharp turn down to the left and became Nelson Street, a rather more promising street, Isabel had always thought. She had known a painter who lived there, in a top-floor flat with skylights that faced north and which admitted a clear light that suffused all his paintings. She had known him and his wife well, and had often gone for dinner with them before they left to live in France.
There he stopped painting, she had heard, and grew vines instead. Then he died suddenly, and his wife married a French-man and moved to Lyons, where her new husband was a judge.
She heard from her from time to time, but after a few years the letters stopped. The judge, she was told by others, had become involved in a corruption scandal and had been sent to prison in Marseilles. The painter’s widow had moved to the south to be able to visit her husband in prison, but had been too ashamed to tell any of her old friends about what had happened. Nelson Street, then, was a street of mixed associations for Isabel.
Swinging his plastic shopping bag as he walked, Toby crossed to the far side of Nelson Street, watched discreetly by a now almost loitering Isabel. He looked up at the tenement building and then briefly glanced at his watch. He was now directly outside a set of five stone steps that led up to the door of one of the ground-floor flats. Isabel saw him pause for a moment, and then he strode up the steps and pushed the button of the large brass bell to the side of the door. She held back now, taking advantage of the cover provided by a van which was parked near the corner 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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of the street. After a moment, the door opened and she saw a young woman, dressed, she thought, in a T-shirt and jeans, come forward from the dark of the hall, momentarily into the light, and there, in Isabel’s full view, lean toward Toby, put her arms round his shoulders, and kiss him.
He did not reel back; of course not. He bent forward in her arms, lowered his shopping bag to the floor, and then embraced her, pushing her gently back into the hallway. Isabel stood quite still. She had not expected this. She had expected nothing. But she had not thought that her whimsical decision of five minutes ago would have led to a conclusive affirmation of her earlier intu-itions about Toby. Unfaithful.
She stood there for a few minutes more, her gaze fixed on the closed door. Then she turned away and walked back up Northumberland Street, feeling dirtied by what she had seen, and by what she had done. In such a way, and with such a heart, must people creep away from brothels or the locus of an illicit assignation; mortal, guilty, as WHA would have it in that grave poem in which he describes the aftermath of the carnal, when sleeping heads might lie, so innocently, upon faithless arms.
C H A P T E R T E N
E
GRACE SAID: “I was standing there at the bus stop, waiting for a bus. They’re meant to come every twelve minutes, but that’s laughable. Laughable. There was a puddle of water on the road and a car went past, driven by a young man in a baseball cap, back to front, and he splashed this woman who was standing next to me. She was soaked through. Dripping. He saw it, you know. But did he stop to apologise? Of course not. What do you expect?”
“I don’t expect anything,” said Isabel, warming her hands round her mug of coffee. “It’s the decline of civility. Or, should I say, it’s the absence of civility.”
“Decline, absence, same thing,” Grace retorted.
“Not quite,” said Isabel. “Decline means less than before.
Absence means not there—maybe never was.”
“Are you telling me that people used not to apologise for splashing other people?” Grace’s indignation showed through.
Her employer, she was convinced, was far too liberal on some matters, including young men in baseball caps.
“Some did, I expect,” said Isabel soothingly. “Others didn’t.
There’s no way of telling whether there are fewer apologisers these days than before. It’s rather like policemen looking younger.
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Policemen are the same age as they always were; it’s just that to some of us they look younger.”
Grace was not to be put off by this answer. “Well, I can tell, all right. Policemen are definitely younger, and manners have gone down the cludgie, right down. You see it every day in the street. You’d have to be blind not to notice. Boys need fathers to teach them how to behave.”
The argument, which was taking place in the kitchen, was like all their discussions. Grace defended a proposition and did not move, and they usually ended with a vague concession by Isabel that the matter was very complicated and would have to be thought about, but that Grace was certainly right, up to a point.
Isabel rose to her feet. It was almost ten past nine and the morning crossword called. She picked up the newspaper from the kitchen table, and leaving Grace to continue with the folding of the washing, she made her way to the morning room. Right and wrong. Boys need fathers to teach them the difference between right and wrong. This was true, but like many of Grace’s observations it was only half true. What was wrong with mothers for this role? She knew a number of mothers who had brought up sons by themselves, and brought them up well. One of her friends, deserted by her husband six weeks after the birth of her son, had made a magnificent job of his upbringing, against all the odds which single mothers face. He had turned out well, that boy, as had many others like him. Boys need a parent is what Grace should have said.
Toby had a father, and yet here was Toby two-timing Cat.
Had his father ever said anything to him about how one should behave towards women? It was an interesting question, and Isabel had no idea about whether fathers spoke to their sons about such things. Did fathers take their sons aside and say: 1 1 0
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“Treat women with respect”? Or was that too old-fashioned? Perhaps she could ask Jamie about this, as he certainly knew how to treat women with respect, unlike Toby.
Isabel suspected that the way men behaved towards women depended on much more complex psychological factors. It was not a question of moral knowledge, she thought; it was more a matter of confidence in self and sexual integration. A man with a fragile ego, unsure of who he is, would treat a woman as a means of combating his insecurity. A man who knew who he was and who was sure of his sexuality would be sensitive to women’s feelings. He would have nothing to prove.