The Sunday Philosophy Club (3 page)

She moved a chair in the morning room so that she would be by the window. It was a clear day, and the sun was on the blossom on the apple trees which lined one edge of her walled garden. The blossom was late this year, and she wondered whether there would be apples again this summer. Every now and then the trees became barren and produced no fruit; then, the following year, they would be laden with a proliferation of small red apples that she would pick and make into chutney and sauce according to a recipe which her mother had given her.

Her mother—her
sainted American mother
—had died when
Isabel was eleven, and the memories were fading. Months and years blurred into one another, and Isabel’s mental picture of the face that looked down at her as she was tucked into bed at night was vague now. She could hear the voice, though, echoing somewhere in her mind; that soft southern voice that her father had said reminded him of moss on trees and characters from Tennessee Williams plays.

Seated in the morning room with a cup of coffee, her second, on the glass-topped side table, she found herself stuck over the crossword puzzle at an inexplicably early stage. One across had been a gift, almost an insult
—They have slots in the gaming industry
(3-5-7). One-armed bandits. And then,
He’s a German in control
(7). Manager, of course. But after a few of this standard, she came across
Excited by the score?
(7) and
Vulnerable we opined desultorily
(4, 4), both of which remained unsolved, and ruined the rest of the puzzle. She felt frustrated, and cross with herself. The clues would resolve themselves in due course, and come to her later in the day, but for the time being she had been defeated.

She knew, of course, what was wrong. The events of the previous night had upset her, perhaps more than she realised. She had had trouble in getting to sleep, and had awoken in the small hours of the morning, got out of bed, and gone downstairs to fetch a glass of milk. She had tried to read, but had found it difficult to concentrate, and had switched off the light and lain awake in bed, thinking about the boy and that handsome, composed face. Would she have felt differently if it had been somebody older? Would there have been the same poignancy had the lolling head been grey, the face lined with age rather than youthful?

A night of interrupted sleep, and a shock like that—it was small wonder that she could not manage these obvious clues. She tossed the newspaper down and rose to her feet. She wanted to
talk to somebody, to discuss what had happened last night. There was no point in discussing it further with Grace, who would only engage in unlikely speculation and would wander off into long stories about disasters which she had heard about from friends. If urban myths had to start somewhere, Isabel thought that they might begin with Grace. She would walk to Bruntsfield, she decided, and speak to her niece, Cat. Cat owned a delicatessen on a busy corner in the popular shopping area, and provided that there were not too many customers, she would usually take time off to drink a cup of coffee with her aunt.

Cat was sympathetic, and if Isabel ever needed to set things in perspective, her niece would be her first port of call. And it was the same for Cat. When she had difficulties with boyfriends—and such difficulties seemed to be a constant feature of her life—that was the subject of exchanges between the two of them.

“Of course, you know what I’m going to tell you,” Isabel had said to her six months before, just before the arrival of Toby.

“And you know what I’ll say back to you.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I suppose I do. And I know that I shouldn’t say this, because we shouldn’t tell others what to do. But—”

“But you think I should go back to Jamie?”

“Precisely,” said Isabel, thinking of Jamie, with that lovely grin of his and his fine tenor voice.

“Yes, Isabel, but you know, don’t you? You know that I don’t love him. I just don’t.”

There was no answer to that, and the conversation had ended in silence.

SHE FETCHED HER COAT,
calling out to Grace that she was going out and would not be back for lunch. She was not sure
whether Grace heard—there was the whine of a vacuum cleaner from somewhere within the house—and she called out again. This time the vacuum cleaner was switched off and there was a response.

“Don’t make lunch,” Isabel called. “I’m not very hungry.”

Cat was busy when Isabel arrived at the delicatessen. There were several customers in the shop, two busying themselves with the choice of a bottle of wine, pointing at labels and discussing the merits of Brunello over Chianti, while Cat was allowing another to sample a sliver of cheese from a large block of pecorino on a marble slab. She caught Isabel’s eye and smiled, mouthing a greeting. Isabel pointed to one of the tables at which Cat served her customers coffee; she would wait there until the customers had left.

There were continental newspapers and magazines neatly stacked beside the table and she picked up a two-day-old copy of
Corriere della Sera.
She read Italian, as did Cat, and skipping the pages devoted to Italian politics—which she found impenetrable—she turned to the arts pages. There was a lengthy reevaluation of Calvino and a short article on the forthcoming season at La Scala. She decided that neither interested her: she knew none of the singers referred to in the headline to the La Scala article, and Calvino, in her view, needed no reassessment. That left a piece on an Albanian filmmaker who had become established in Rome and who was attempting to make films about his native country. It turned out to be a thoughtful read: there had been no cameras in Hoxha’s Albania, apparently—only those owned by the security police for the purpose of photographing suspects. It was not until he was thirty, the director revealed, that he had managed to get his hands on any photographic apparatus.
I was trembling,
he said.
I thought I might drop it.

Isabel finished the article and put down the newspaper. Poor
man. All those years which had been wasted. Whole lifetimes had been spent in oppression and the denial of opportunities. Even if people knew, or suspected, that it would come to an end, many must have imagined that it would be too late for them. Would it help to know that one’s children might have what one was not allowed to taste for oneself? She looked at Cat. Cat, who was twenty-four, had never really known what it was like when half the world—or so it seemed—had been unable to talk to the other half. She had been a young girl when the Berlin Wall came down, and Stalin, and Hitler, and all the other tyrants were distant historical figures to her, almost as remote as the Borgias. Who were her bogeymen? she wondered. Who, if anyone, would really terrify her generation? A few days earlier she had heard somebody on the radio say that children should be taught that there are no evil people and that evil was just that which people did. The observation had arrested her: she was standing in the kitchen when she heard it, and she stopped exactly where she stood, and watched the leaves of a tree move against the sky outside. There are no evil people. Had he actually said that? There were always people who were prepared to say that sort of thing, just to show that they were not old-fashioned. Well, she suspected that one would not hear such a comment from this man from Albania, who had lived with evil about him like the four walls of a prison.

She found herself gazing at the label of a bottle of olive oil which Cat had placed in a prominent position on a shelf near the table. It was painted in that nineteenth-century rural style which the Italians use to demonstrate the integrity of agricultural products. This was not from a factory, the illustration proclaimed; this was from a real farm, where women like those shown on the bottle pressed the oil from their own olives, where there were large,
sweet-smelling white oxen and, in the background, a moustachioed farmer with a hoe. These were decent people, who believed in evil, and in the Virgin, and in a whole bevy of saints. But of course they did not exist anymore, and the olive oil probably came from North Africa and was rebottled by cynical Neapolitan businessmen who only paid lip service to the Virgin, when their mothers were within earshot.

“You’re thinking,” said Cat, lowering herself into the other chair. “I can always tell when you’re thinking profound thoughts. You look dreamy.”

Isabel smiled. “I was thinking about Italy, and evil, and topics of that nature.”

Cat wiped her hands on a cloth. “I was thinking of cheese,” she said. “That woman sampled eight Italian cheeses and then bought a small block of farmhouse cheddar.”

“Simple tastes,” said Isabel. “You mustn’t blame her.”

“I’ve decided that I’m not too keen on the public,” said Cat. “I’d like to have a private shop. People would have to apply for membership before they could come in. I’d have to approve them. Rather like the members of your philosophy club or whatever it is.”

“The Sunday Philosophy Club is not exactly very active,” she said to Cat. “But we’ll have a meeting one of these days.”

“It’s such a good idea,” said Cat. “I’d come, but Sunday’s a bad day for me. I can never get myself organised to do anything. You know how it is. You know, don’t you?”

Isabel did know. This, presumably, was what afflicted the members of the club.

Cat looked at her. “Is everything all right? You look a bit low. I can always tell, you know.”

Isabel was silent for a moment. She looked down at the pattern
on the tablecloth, and then looked back up at her niece. “No. I suppose I’m not feeling all that cheerful. Something happened last night. I saw something terrible.”

Cat frowned, and reached across the table to place a hand on Isabel’s arm. “What happened?”

“Have you seen the paper this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see that item about the young man at the Usher Hall?”

“Yes,” said Cat. “I did.”

“I was there,” said Isabel simply. “I saw him fall from the gods, right past my eyes.”

Cat gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must have been terrible.” She paused. “I know who it was, by the way. Somebody came in this morning and told me. I knew him, vaguely.”

For a moment Isabel said nothing. She had expected no more than to tell Cat about what had happened; she had not imagined that she would know him, that poor, falling boy.

“He lived near here,” Cat went on to explain. “In Marchmont. One of those flats right on the edge of the Meadows, I think. He came in here from time to time, but I really saw a bit more of his flatmates.”

“Who was he?” Isabel asked.

“Mark somebody or other,” Cat replied. “I was told his surname, but I can’t remember it. Somebody was in this morning—she knew them better—and she told me that it had happened. I was pretty shocked—like you.”

“Them?” asked Isabel. “Was he married or …” She paused. People often did not bother to marry, she had to remind herself, and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases. But how
did you put that particular question? Did he have a partner? But partners could be anyone, from the most temporary or recent to the wife or husband of fifty years. Perhaps one should just say: Was there somebody else? Which was sufficiently vague to cover everything.

Cat shook her head. “I don’t think so. There were two flatmates. Three of them shared. A girl and another boy. The girl’s from the west, Glasgow or somewhere, and she’s the one who comes in here. The other one I’m not sure about. Neil, I think, but I may be mixing him up.”

Cat’s assistant, a silent young man called Eddie, who always avoided eye contact, now brought them each a cup of hot milky coffee. Isabel thanked him and smiled, but he looked away and retreated to the back of the counter.

“What’s wrong with Eddie?” whispered Isabel. “He never looks at me. I’m not all that frightening, am I?”

Cat smiled. “He’s a hard worker,” she replied. “And he’s honest.”

“But he never looks at anyone.”

“There may be a reason for that,” said Cat. “I came across him the other evening, sitting in the back room, his feet on the desk. He had his head in his hands and I didn’t realise it at first, but he was in tears.”

“Why?” asked Isabel. “Did he tell you?”

Cat hesitated for a moment. “He told me something. Not very much.”

Isabel waited, but it was clear that Cat did not want to divulge what Eddie had said to her. She steered the subject back to the event of the previous night. How could he have fallen from the gods when there was that brass rail, was there not, which was intended to stop exactly that? Was it a suicide? Would somebody really jump from there? It would be a selfish way of going, surely,
as there could easily be somebody down below who could be injured, or even killed.

“It wasn’t suicide,” Isabel said firmly. “Definitely not.”

“How do you know?” asked Cat. “You said you didn’t see him actually go over the edge. How can you be so sure?”

“He came down upside down,” said Isabel, remembering the sight of the jacket and shirt pulled down by gravity and the exposed flat midriff. He was like a boy diving off a cliff, into a sea that was not there.

“So? People turn around, presumably, when they fall. Surely that means nothing.”

Isabel shook her head. “He would not have had time to do that. You must remember that he was just above us. And people don’t dive when they commit suicide. They fall feetfirst.”

Cat thought for a moment. That was probably right. Occasionally the newspaper printed pictures of people on the way down from buildings and bridges, and they tended to be falling feetfirst. But it still seemed so unlikely that anybody could fall over that parapet by mistake, unless it was lower than she remembered it. She would take a look next time she was in the Usher Hall.

They sipped at their coffee. Cat broke the silence. “You must feel awful. I remember when I saw an accident in George Street, I felt just awful myself. Just witnessing something like that is so traumatic.”

“I didn’t come here to sit and moan, you know,” said Isabel. “I didn’t want to sit here and make you feel miserable too. I’m sorry.”