The woman who had been standing up suddenly sank back into her seat. She put her hands up to her face and covered her eyes. She was sobbing. A woman behind her reached forward to comfort her.
The medium said nothing. When the woman’s sobbing had subsided, she sat down again and looked up at the ceiling, and did so for a good fifteen minutes. She rose to her feet and looked about the room, her gaze alighting on the man behind Grace.
“I have somebody coming through for you,” she said. “I have somebody here. Yes. This is your wife. She is here. She is with me. She is with you. Can you sense her presence?”
Isabel did not like to turn and stare, but did so anyway, discreetly. The man’s eyes were fixed on the medium; he was listening intently. In response to her question he nodded.
“Good,” said the medium. “She is coming through very strongly now. She says that she is still with you. She . . .” The medium hesitated, and frowned. “She is concerned for you. She is concerned that there is one who is trying to get to know you better. She is concerned that this person is not the right person for you. That is what she says.”
The relaying of this message had its effect on the room, and there were whispers. One or two people turned round and looked in the direction of the man to whom it was directed.
Others looked firmly ahead at the medium. Isabel glanced at 1 4 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace, who was looking down at the floor and who seemed hunched up, as if hoping for the moment of embarrassment around her to pass.
There was little more after that. The world of spirit, momentarily goaded into action by the medium, must have been exhausted, and after a few minutes the medium declared that she had finished her communication with the other side.
Now it was time for tea, and they all withdrew to a cheerfully furnished room next to the library. There were plates of biscuits and cups of strong, warm tea.
“Very interesting,” whispered Isabel. “Thank you, Grace.”
Grace nodded. She seemed preoccupied, though, and did not say anything as she helped Isabel to a cup of tea and a biscuit. Isabel looked about her. She saw the medium standing at the side of the room. She was sipping at a cup of tea and talking to the man who had introduced her, the man in the black suit.
But as she talked, Isabel saw her eyes move about the room, as if seeking somebody out. And they fixed on the man who had been seated behind her, the man who had received the message from his wife. Isabel looked at the medium’s expression, and at her eyes in particular. It was very clear to her, as it would be clear, she thought, to any woman. She had seen enough.
C H A P T E R F I F T E E N
E
WHAT’S IT LIKE?” Ian asked. “I know it may sound like a rather simple question, naïve perhaps, but what’s it like—being a philosopher?”
Isabel looked out of the window. It was mid-morning and they were sitting in her study, the tang of freshly brewed coffee in the air. Outside, on the corners of her lawn, the weeds had begun to make their presence increasingly obvious. She needed several hours, she thought, several hours which she would never find, for digging and raking. One must cultivate one’s garden, said Voltaire; and there, he said, is happiness to be found rather than in philosophising. She thought for a moment of the juxtaposition of philosophy and the everyday: zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance had been an inspired combination for its moment, but there might be others, as novel and surprising. “Voltaire and the control of weeds,” she muttered.
“Voltaire and . . . ?” asked Ian.
“Just musing,” said Isabel. “But in answer to your question: It’s much the same as being anything else. You carry your profession with you, I suppose, in much the same way as a doctor 1 5 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h or, I should imagine, a psychologist does. You see the world in a particular way, don’t you? As a psychologist?”
Ian followed her gaze out into the garden. “To an extent,” he said, but sounded doubtful. “Being a philosopher, though, must be rather different from being anything else. You must think about everything. You must spend your time pondering over what things mean. A somewhat higher realm than the rest of us inhabit.”
Isabel drew herself away from the lawn. She had been thinking about weeds. But weeds, and what to do about them, were very much a part of everyday life, and everyday life was exactly what philosophy was about. We were rooted in it, inevitably, and how we reacted to it—our customs, our obser-vances—was the very stuff of moral philosophy. Hume had called them, these little conventions, a kind of lesser morality, and in her view he had been right.
“It’s much more mundane and everyday than you would imagine,” she began. And then she stopped. One could easily simplify too much, and discussions about social convention could give him the wrong idea. How you drank your coffee was not what it was about, but the fact that you drank coffee together was of tremendous significance. But she could not say that, because that statement could be made only after a great deal of earlier ground had been covered and understood.
Ian nodded. “I see. Well, that’s a little bit disappointing. I imagined that you spent all your time pacing about trying to work out the nature of reality—wondering whether the world outside is real enough to take a walk in. That sort of thing.”
Isabel laughed. “Sorry to disabuse you of such amusing notions. No. But I must admit that my calling—if I can call it that—sometimes makes life a little difficult for me.”
F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
1 5 1
This interested him. “In what way?”
“Well, it’s mostly a question of duty,” Isabel said. She sighed, thinking of her demons; moral obligation was the real problem. This was the cross she bore, the rack on which she was obliged to lie—even the metaphors were uncomfortable.
“I find myself thinking very carefully about what I should do in any given situation,” she went on. “And it can get a little bit burdensome for me. In fact, sometimes I feel rather like those unfortunate people with OCD—you know, obsessive-compulsive disorder; of course you know that, you’re a clinical psychologist—but I sometimes think I’m like those people who have to check ten times that they’ve turned the oven off or who have to wash their hands again and again to get rid of germs. I think I can understand how they feel.”
“Now you’re on familiar ground,” he said. “I had quite a few patients with OCD. One woman I knew had a thing about doorhandles. She had to cover the doorhandle with a handker-chief before she could open it. Tricky, sometimes. And public washrooms were a real agony for her. She had to use her foot to flush. She lifted a foot and pushed the lever down by stepping on it.”
Isabel thought for a moment. “Very wise,” she said with a smile. “Imagine what results you’d get if you took a swab from one of those handles and cultured it. Imagine.”
“Maybe,” said Ian. “But we need to be exposed to germs, don’t we? All this hygiene and refined foods—what’s the result?
Allergies galore. Everyone will eventually have asthma.” He paused. “But back to philosophy. Those papers over there—are they submissions for that journal of yours?”
Isabel glanced at the pile of manuscripts and suppressed a shudder. Guilt, she thought, can sometimes be measured in 1 5 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h physical quantities. A heavy drinker might measure his guilt in gallons or litres; a glutton in inches round the waist; and the editor of a journal in terms of the height of the stack of manuscripts awaiting her attention. This was almost eighteen inches of guilt.