“Pushed.”
Johnny turned round to face her. She could not make out his 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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expression; he was interested now but the interest was tinged with incredulity, she thought.
“Very unlikely,” he said after a while. “People don’t do that sort of thing. They just don’t.”
Isabel sighed. “I believe that they might,” she said. “And that’s why I wanted to find out about Minty and this insider trading. It could all add up.”
Johnny shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think that you should let go of it. I really don’t think this is going to get you anywhere.”
“I’ll think about it. But I’m very grateful to you, anyway.”
Johnny acknowledged her thanks with a lowering of his eyes.
“And if you want to get in touch with me, here’s my mobile number. Give me a call anytime. I’m up and about until midnight every day.”
He handed her a card on which a number had been scrawled, and Isabel tucked it into her bag.
“Let’s go and hear what Charlie Maclean has to say,” said Johnny, rising to his feet.
“Wet straw,” said Charlie at the other end of the room, putting his nose into the mouth of the glass. “Smell this dram, everyone.
Wet straw, which means a Borders distillery in my book. Wet straw.”
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O
E
OF COURSE JOHNNY was right, Isabel thought—and she had decided accordingly by the following morning. That was the end of it; she would never be able to prove insider trading by Minty Auchterlonie, and even if she did, it would still be necessary to link this with Mark’s death. Johnny knew these people much better than she did, and he had been incredulous of her theory. She should accept that, and let the whole matter rest.
She had reached this conclusion sometime during the night of the whisky tasting, when she had woken up, stared at the shadows on the ceiling for a few minutes, and finally made her decision. Sleep followed shortly afterwards, and the next morning—a brilliant morning on the cusp of spring and summer—she felt an extraordinary freedom, as one does at the end of an examination, when the pen and pencil are put away and nothing more remains to be done. Her time was her own now; she could devote herself to the review and to the pile of books that was stacked invitingly in her study; she could treat herself to morning coffee in Jenners, and watch the well-heeled Edinburgh ladies engage in their gossip, a world which she might so easily have slipped into and which she had avoided by a deliberate act of self-determining 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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choice—thank heavens. And yet, was she any happier than they were, these women with their safe husbands and their children who were set to become like their parents and perpetuate this whole, self-confident world of haut-bourgeois Edinburgh? Probably not; they were happy in their way ( I must not be condescending, she thought), and she was happy in hers. And Grace in hers and Jamie in his, and Minty Auchterlonie . . . She stopped herself, and thought. Minty Auchterlonie’s state of mind is simply no concern of mine. No, she would not go to Jenners that morning, but she would walk into Bruntsfield and buy something that smelled nice from Mellis’s cheese shop and then drink a cup of coffee in Cat’s delicatessen. Then, that evening, there was a lecture she could attend at the Royal Museum of Scotland. Professor Lance Butler of the University of Pau, a lecturer whom she had heard before and who was consistently entertaining, would speak on Beckett, as he always did. That was excitement enough for one day.
And of course there were the crosswords. Downstairs now, she retrieved the newspapers from the mat on the hall and glanced at the headlines. new concern for cod stocks, she read on the front page of The Scotsman, and saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what culture would a generation of computer operators leave behind them? She answered her own question: more than one might imagine—an electronic culture of e-mail tales and computer-generated images, fleeting and derivative, but a culture nonetheless.
She turned to the crossword, recognising several clues immediately. The falls, artist is confusingly preceded again (7), which required no more than a moment’s thought: Niagara. Such a 2 0 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cliché in the crossword world, and this irritated Isabel, who liked novelty, however weak, in clues. And then, to pile Pelion (6) upon Ossa (4), there was Writers I shortly have, thoughtful (7). Isabel was pensive, which solved that one, until she tripped up over An unending Greek god leads to an exclamation, Mother! (6). This could only be zeugma—Zeu(s) g (gee!) ma—a word with which she was unfamiliar, and it sent her to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which confirmed her suspicion. She liked Fowler ( avian hunter of words, she thought) for his opinions, which were clear and directive. Zeugmata, he explained, were a bad thing and incorrect—unlike syllepses, with which they were commonly confused. So Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair was sylleptical, requiring a single word to be understood in a different sense, while See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned was a zeugma and called for the insertion of another quite different verb, surrounded, which was not there.
By the time that Grace arrived, Isabel had finished her breakfast and had dealt with the morning mail. Grace, who was late, arrived in a state of anxiety and a taxi; a sylleptical arrival, Isabel noted. Grace was strict about punctuality and hated to be even a few minutes late, hence the costly taxi and the anxiety.
“The battery of my alarm clock,” she explained as she came into the kitchen, where Isabel was sitting. “You never think of changing them, and then they die on you.”
Isabel had already prepared the coffee and she poured her housekeeper a cup, while Grace tidied her hair in front of the small mirror that she had hung on the wall beside the pantry door.
“I was at my meeting last night,” Grace said, as she took her first sip of coffee. “There were more people there than usual. And a very good medium—a woman from Inverness—who was quite 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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remarkable. She got right to the heart of things. It was quite uncanny.”
Grace went on the first Wednesday of each month to a spiri-tualist meeting in a street off Queensferry Place. Once or twice she had invited Isabel to accompany her but Isabel, who feared that she might laugh, had declined the invitation and Grace had not persevered. Isabel did not approve of mediums, who she felt were, for the most part, charlatans. It seemed to her that many of the people who went to such meetings (although not Grace) had lost somebody and were desperate for contact beyond the grave.
And rather than help them to let go, these mediums encouraged them to think that the dead could be contacted. In Isabel’s view it was cruel and exploitative.
“This woman from Inverness,” Grace went on, “she’s called Annie McAllum. You can tell that she’s a medium just by looking at her. She has that Gaelic colouring—you know, the dark hair and the translucent skin. And green eyes too. You can tell that she has the gift. You can tell.”
“But I thought that anybody could be a medium,” said Isabel.