Londoners are perfectly agreeable people—very cheerful, in spite of everything—but I’m sure that you are so much more appreciated in Edinburgh than you would be in London. I, for one, appreciate you, and I know that Grace does too, and then there are all those pupils of yours whose musicianship would take a dive were you to absent yourself. In short, we have all had a narrow escape.
“Does that all sound selfish? Yes, it does to me. It sounds to me as if I am giving you all sorts of reasons to stay in Edinburgh while really only thinking of myself and how much I would miss your company if you were to go. So you must discount my advice on that score and do exactly as you wish, should a future opportunity arise. And I must do the same. Although I have no desire to go anywhere, except for Western Australia, and the city of Mobile in Alabama, and Havana, and Buenos Aires, and . . .”
She finished the letter, addressed it, and placed it on the hall table. When she left to go home in the afternoon, Grace would pick up the mail and deposit it in the postbox at the top of the road. Jamie would get her apology tomorrow and she would arrange to see him the day afterwards. She could ask him to bring some music and they would go into the music room and she would play the piano while he sang and it became dark outside. The editor of the Review of Applied Ethics (at the piano) F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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with her friend Jamie (tenor). How very Edinburgh. How very poignant.
She thought to herself—and smiled at the thought—if one followed the well-ordered life one would start each day with the writing of one’s letters of apology . . . She wondered for a moment who else might be expecting an apology from her. Perhaps she had been a bit harsh in her rejection of that article on vice from that vicious Australian professor; perhaps he was gentle and sensitive and was in favour of vice only in the most the-oretical of senses; perhaps he wept by whatever shore it was when he received her rejection—more likely he did not. All the Australian professors of philosophy she had met had been fairly robust. And she had not been rude to him—a bit brisk perhaps, but not rude.
She went through to the kitchen, thinking of form and friendship and how letters—and gifts—were the only vestiges of form which remained to us in the conduct of our friendships.
Other cultures had much more elaborate forms for the recognition and cultivation of friendship. In South America, she had read, two men becoming friends might undergo a form of bap-tism ceremony over a tree trunk, symbolically becoming god-children of the tree and therefore, in a sense, brothers to each other. That was strange, and we were just too busy to arrange ceremonies of that sort; meeting for coffee was easier. And in Germany, where form is preserved, there would be linguistic milestones in the development of friendship, with the change to the familiar du address. Of course one should not too quickly start to use the first names of friends in Germany; in some quarters a good few years might be required. Isabel smiled as she remembered being told by a professor from Freiburg of how, 2 4 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h after several years of knowing a colleague, they were still on formal terms. Then, one evening, when the colleague had invited him to his house to watch an important football match on tele-vision, in a moment of great excitement he had shouted out “Oh look, Reinhard, Germany has scored a goal!” and had immediately clasped a hand to his mouth, embarrassed by the solecism.
He had called his colleague by his first name, and they had known one another for only a few years! Fortunately, the visitor had taken a generous view of this lapse, and they had agreed to move to first-name terms there and then, drinking a toast to friendship, as is appropriate in such circumstances.
Isabel had been intrigued. “But what happens,” she asked,
“if two colleagues agree to address one another as du and then they fall out over something? Does one revert to the old formal usage and go back to sie?”
Her friend had pondered this for a while. “There has been such a situation,” he said. “I gather that it occurred in Bonn, amongst professors of theology. They had to go back to the formal means of address. It caused a great many ripples and is still talked about. In Bonn.”
She switched on the coffee percolator in the kitchen and looked out of the window while the machine heated up and entered upon its programme of gurgles. The next-door cat, arro-gant and self-assured, was on the high stone wall that divided her garden from its own—not that he recognised these human boundaries. The real boundaries, the feline lines of territory, were jealously guarded and supported by a whole different set of laws that humans knew nothing about, but which had every bit as much validity—down amongst the undergrowth of cat jurisdiction—as did the law of Scotland. The cat hesitated, turned round, and stared at Isabel through the window.
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“That cat knew I was looking at him,” said Isabel, as Grace came into the room. “He turned round and stared at me.”
“They’re telepathic,” said Grace, simply. “Everybody knows that.”
Isabel thought for a moment. “I had a discussion with somebody yesterday about heaven. She said that one of the reasons for not believing in heaven—or indeed in any afterlife—is that there would be so many animals’ souls. It would be a terribly crowded place. Administratively impossible.”
Grace smiled. “That’s because she’s still thinking in con-crete terms,” she said. And then, with the air of authority of one explaining New York to someone who has not been there:
“Those physical things don’t apply on the other side.”
“Oh?” said Isabel. “So cats and dogs cross over, if I may use your term. Do you . . . do you hear from them at the meetings?”
Grace stiffened. “You may not have a high opinion of what we do,” she said, “but I assure you, it’s serious business.”
Isabel was quick to apologise—her second apology of the morning, and it was not yet ten-thirty. Grace accepted. “I’m used to people being sceptical,” she said. “It’s normal.”
Grace went out to the hall to check for mail. “No postie yet,” she said when she came back, using the Scots familiar term for the postman. “But this has been pushed through the door.” She passed over a white, unstamped envelope on which Isabel’s name had been written.
Isabel laid the envelope to the side of the percolator while she poured her coffee. Her name had been written in an unfamiliar hand, Miss Isabel Dalhousie, and underneath the words a flourish of the pen like one of those on Renaissance manuscripts. And then she knew; it was an Italian hand.
She took her cup of coffee in one hand and the letter in the 2 4 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h other. Grace glanced at her and at the letter, clearly hoping that Isabel would open it in the kitchen and she would find out the identity of the sender. But this was private business, thought Isabel. This was to do with their trip, and she wanted to read it in her study. The envelope had that charged look about it, something which was difficult, if not impossible, to identify, but which hung about love letters and letters of sexual significance like perfume.
She stood by the window of her study while she opened it.
She noticed that her hands were shaking, just slightly, but shaking. And then she saw from the top of the notepaper, Pres-tonfield House, that she had been right in her assumption.
Dear Isabel Dalhousie,
I am so sorry that I have had to write, rather than to call on you personally. I have some business in Edinburgh today that will make it difficult for me to see you before I leave.