“You don’t have to say sorry,” said Cat, taking Isabel’s hand.
“You just sit here as long as you like and then we can go out for lunch a bit later on. I could take the afternoon off and do something with you. How about that?”
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Isabel appreciated the offer, but she wanted to sleep that afternoon. And she should not sit at the table too long either, as it was meant for the use of customers.
“Perhaps you could come and have dinner with me tonight,”
she said. “I’ll rustle up something.”
Cat opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated. Isabel saw this. She would be going out with one of the boyfriends.
“I’d love to,” said Cat at last. “The only problem is that I was going to be meeting Toby. We were going to meet at the pub.”
“Of course,” said Isabel, quickly. “Some other time.”
“Unless Toby could come too?” Cat added. “I’m sure he’d be happy to do that. Why don’t I make a starter and bring it along?”
Isabel was about to refuse, as she imagined that the young couple might not really want to have dinner with her, but Cat now insisted, and they agreed that she and Toby would come to the house shortly after eight. As Isabel left and began to walk back to the house, she thought about Toby. He had arrived in Cat’s life a few months before, and like the one before him, Andrew, she had her misgivings about him. It was difficult to put one’s finger exactly on why it was that she had these reservations, but she was convinced that she was right.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
E
THAT AFTERNOON SHE SLEPT. When she awoke, shortly before five, she felt considerably better. Grace had gone, but had left a note on the kitchen table. Somebody phoned. He would not say who he was. I told him you were asleep. He said that he would phone again. I did not like the sound of him. She was used to notes like that from Grace: messages would be conveyed with a gloss on the character of those involved. That plumber I never trusted called and said that he would come tomorrow. He would not give a time. Or: While you were out, that woman returned that book she borrowed. At last.
She was usually bemused by Grace’s comments, but over the years she had come to see that Grace’s insights were useful.
Grace was rarely wrong about character, and her judgements were devastating. They were often of the one-word variety: cheat, she would say about somebody, or crook, or drunkard. If her views were positive, they might be slightly longer— most generous, or really kind—but these plaudits were hard to earn. Isabel had pressed her once as to the basis of her assessments of people, and Grace had become tight-lipped.
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“I can just tell,” she would say. “People are very easy to read.
That’s all there is to it.”
“But there’s often much more to them than you think,” Isabel had argued. “Their qualities only come out when you get to know them a bit better.”
Grace had shrugged. “There are some people I don’t want to get to know better.”
The discussion had ended there. Isabel knew that she would be unable to change the other woman’s mind. Grace’s world was very clear: there was Edinburgh, and the values which Edinburgh endorsed; and then there was the rest. It went without saying that Edinburgh was right, and that the best that could be hoped for was that those who looked at things differently would eventually come round to the right way of thinking. When Grace had first been employed—shortly after the onset of Isabel’s father’s illness—Isabel had been astonished to find that there was somebody who was still so firmly planted in a world that she had thought had largely disappeared: the world of douce Edinburgh, erected on rigid hierarchies and the deep convictions of Scottish Presbyterianism. Grace had proved her wrong.
It was the world which Isabel’s father had come from, but from which he had wanted to free himself. He had been a lawyer, from a line of lawyers. He could have remained within the narrow world of his own father and grandfather, a world bounded by trust deeds and documents of title, but as a student he had been introduced to international law and a world of broader possibilities.
He had enrolled for a master’s degree in the law of treaties; Harvard, where he went for this, might have offered him an escape, but in the event did not. Moral suasion was brought to bear on him to return to Scotland. He almost stayed in America, but 2 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h decided at the last moment to return, accompanied by his new wife, whom he had met and married in Boston. Once in Edinburgh, he was sucked back into the family’s legal practise, where he was never happy. In an unguarded moment he had remarked to his daughter that he regarded his entire working life as a sentence which he had been obliged to serve out, a conclusion that had privately appalled Isabel. It was for this reason that when her time came to go to university, she had put to one side all thoughts of a career and chosen the subject which really interested her, philosophy.
There had been two children: Isabel, the elder of the two, and a brother. Isabel had gone to school in Edinburgh, but her brother had been sent off to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. Their parents had chosen for him a school noted for intellectual achievement, and unhappiness. What could one expect?
The placing of five hundred boys together, cut off from the world, was an invitation to create a community in which every cruelty and vice could flourish, and did. He had become unhappy and rigid in his views, out of self-defence—the character armour which Wil-helm Reich spoke about, Isabel thought, and which led to these stiff, unhappy men who talked so guardedly in their clipped voices.
After university, which he left without getting a degree, he took a job in a City of London merchant bank, and led a quiet and correct life doing whatever it was that merchant bankers did. He and Isabel had never been close, and as an adult he contacted Isabel only occasionally. He was almost a stranger to her, she thought; a friendly, if rather detached, stranger whose only real passion that she could detect was a consuming interest in the collecting of colourful old share certificates and bonds: South American railway stock, czarist long-term bonds—a whole colourful world of capital-ism. But she had once asked him what lay behind these ornately 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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printed certificates of ownership. Fourteen-hour workdays on plantations? Men working for a pittance until they were too weakened by silicosis, or too poisoned by toxins, to work anymore? (Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?)
S H E W E N T I N TO T H E L A R D E R and retrieved the ingredients for a risotto she would make for Cat and Toby. The recipe called for porcini mushrooms, and she had a supply of these, tied up in a muslin bag. Isabel took a handful of the dried fungus, savouring the unusual odour, sharp and salty, so difficult to classify. Yeast extract? She would soak them for half an hour and then use the darkened liquid they produced to cook the rice. She knew that Cat liked risotto and that this was one of her favourites, and Toby, she imagined, would eat anything. He had been brought to dinner once before, and it was at this meal that her doubts about him had set in. She would have to be careful, though, or she would end up making Grace-like judgements. Unfaithful. She had already done it.