A lie, she thought, but only a lie at this stage of the plan’s conception; lies can become truths. She had indeed planned to buy a Blackadder and there was no reason why she should not commission one. In fact, she would do exactly that, which meant that she could see Paul Hogg on these grounds with a perfectly good conscience. Not even Sissela Bok, author of Lying, could object. Then, having examined the Blackadder again, which he would be proudly displaying on his wall, she would delicately raise the possibility that Mark Fraser might have found out something awkward in the course of his work at McDowell’s. Would Paul Hogg have any idea of what that might be? And if he did not, then she might be more specific and say to him that if he was attached to the young man—and he clearly had been fond of him, judging from his emotional reaction to what she had said in the Vincent Bar—then might he not be prepared to make some enquiries so as to prove or disprove the worrying hypothesis that 1 3 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h all of this seemed to be pointing towards? It would have to be handled delicately, but it could be done. He might agree. And all the time, just to give her confidence, Jamie would be sitting beside her on Paul Hogg’s chintzy sofa. We think, she could say; we wonder. That sounded much more reasonable than the same thing expressed in the singular.
She telephoned Jamie the next morning at the earliest decent hour; nine o’clock, in her view. Isabel observed an etiquette of the telephone: a call before eight in the morning was an emergency; between eight and nine it was an intrusion; thereafter calls could be made until ten in the evening, although anything after nine-thirty required an apology for the disturbance. After ten one was into emergency time again. On answering the telephone one should, if at all possible, give one’s name, but only after saying good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. None of these conventions, she conceded, was observed to any great extent by others, and not, she noted, by Jamie himself, who answered her call that morning with an abrupt “Yes.”
“You don’t sound very welcoming,” said Isabel disapprovingly.
“And how do I know who you are? ‘Yes’ is not enough. And if you had been too busy to take the call, would you simply have said ‘No’?”
“Isabel?” he said.
“Had you told me who you were, then I would have reciprocated the courtesy. Your last question would then have been otiose.”
Jamie laughed. “How long is this going to take?” he asked. “I have to get a train to Glasgow at ten. We’re rehearsing for Parsifal. ”
“Poor you,” said Isabel. “Poor singers. What an endurance test.”
“Yes,” Jamie agreed. “Wagner makes my head sore. But I really must get ready.”
Isabel quickly explained her idea to him and then waited for his reaction.
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“If you insist,” Jamie said. “I suppose it sounds feasible enough.
I’ll come along if you insist. Really insist.”
He could have been more accommodating, thought Isabel after she had rung off, but at least he had agreed. Now she would have to telephone Paul Hogg at McDowell’s and ask him if and when it would be convenient to visit him. She was confident that he would welcome her suggestion. They had got on well together, and apart from the moment when she had inadvertently triggered in him a painful memory, the evening they had spent together had been a success. He had suggested, had he not, that she meet his fiancée, whose name she had forgotten but who could be referred to for the time being simply as “fiancée.”
She telephoned at 10:45, a time when she believed there was the greatest chance that anybody who worked in an office would be having their morning coffee, and in fact he was, when she asked him.
“Yes. I’m sitting here with the FT on my desk. I should be reading it, but I’m not. I’m looking out the window and drinking my coffee.”
“But I’m sure that you’re about to take important decisions,”
she said. “And one of them will be whether you would allow me to look at your Blackadder again. I want to ask her to do one for me, and I thought that it might be helpful to look at yours again.”
“Of course,” he said. “Anybody can look at it. It’s still in the exhibition. It has another week to run.”
Isabel was momentarily taken by surprise. Of course she should have telephoned the gallery to find out whether the show was still on, and if it was, she should have waited until he had collected his painting.
“But it would be very nice to see you anyway,” Paul Hogg went on helpfully. “I have another Blackadder you might like to see.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h They made the arrangement. Isabel would come the following evening, at six, for drinks. Paul Hogg was perfectly happy for her to bring somebody with her too, a young man who was very interested in art and whom she would like him to meet. Of course that would be perfectly convenient, and nice too.
It was so easy, thought Isabel. It was so easy dealing with people who were well-mannered, as Paul Hogg was. They knew how to exchange those courtesies which made life go smoothly, which was what manners were all about. They were intended to avoid friction between people, and they did this by regulating the contours of an encounter. If each party knew what the other should do, then conflict would be unlikely. And this worked at every level, from the most minor transaction between two people to dealings between nations. International law, after all, was simply a system of manners writ large.
Jamie had good manners. Paul Hogg had good manners. Her mechanic, the proprietor of the small backstreet garage where she took her rarely used car for servicing, had perfect manners.
Toby, by contrast, had bad manners; not on the surface, where he thought, quite wrongly, that it counted, but underneath, in his attitude to others. Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete moral seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs.
Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this, and it always showed. They were impatient with those whom they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged. The person with good manners, however, would always listen to such people and treat them with respect.
How utterly shortsighted we had been to listen to those who thought that manners were a bourgeois affectation, an irrelevance, which need no longer be valued. A moral disaster had ensued, 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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because manners were the basic building block of civil society.
They were the method of transmitting the message of moral consideration. In this way an entire generation had lost a vital piece of the moral jigsaw, and now we saw the results: a society in which nobody would help, nobody would feel for others; a society in which aggressive language and insensitivity were the norm.
She stopped herself. This was a train of thought which, though clearly correct, made her feel old; as old as Cicero declaim-ing, O tempora! O mores! And this fact, in itself, demonstrated the subtle, corrosive power of relativism. The relativists had suc-ceeded in so getting under our moral skins that their attitudes had become internalised, and Isabel Dalhousie, with all her interest in moral philosophy and distaste for the relativist position, actually felt embarrassed to be thinking such thoughts.
She must stop this musing on moral imagination, she thought, and concentrate on things of more immediate importance, such as checking the morning’s mail for the review and finding out why that poor boy Mark Fraser fell to his death from the gods. But she knew she would never abandon these broader issues; it was her lot. She may as well accept it. She was tuned in to a different sta-tion from most people and the tuning dial was broken.