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Before they appeared on the screen weren’t they just endless lines of noughts and ones, or odd decimals? That, she thought, was the ultimate triumph of reductionism: Shakespeare’s son-nets could be reduced to rows of noughts; or even the works of Proust; although how much electricity would be consumed to render Proust’s long-winded prose digital? Patient wind tur-bines would turn and turn for days in that process. And what about ourselves, and our own reduction? We could each be rendered, could we not, down to a little puddle of water and a tiny heap of minerals. And that was all we were. Imperial Caesar, dead, and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
Or, as binary code might so prosaically put it: 0100100101101
10101110000 . . .
She worked quickly, and by the time that her lawyer telephoned her she had managed to make an impression on the pile of manuscripts; she had read three, and had embarked on the fourth. None of them, she thought, was likely to get past the peer reviewers, which was sad, as each represented months of effort: thought, planning, hopes. But the problem was that they all had the feel of being written to order, by people who had to write these articles—any articles—because they were academ-ics and it was expected of them. This was their output, the basis on which they would be judged; not on whether they were inspirational teachers who could hold a class of students spellbound, could inspire them to think, but on the production of this sheer wordage, which few would read. Most of these articles would not change the world, would not make one iota of difference to anything. She sighed, and looked at the title page of the next article on the pile. “Dust to Dust: Should We Rebury Old Bones?” Her interest was aroused, and she picked up the manuscript. “Bones of five hundred years of age have been the subject 6 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of controversy. Should archaeologists rebury them, or can museums . . .” She sighed again, and imagined for a moment archaeologists digging up old bones, so carefully, with their trowels and brushes, and then, more or less immediately, burying them once more, with reverence.
She rose to her feet to answer the lawyer’s call, taking the telephone with her to the window of her study.
Simon Mackintosh’s voice was precise. “That place that you looked at,” he began. “The one in St. Stephen Street—I registered your interest in it with the seller’s lawyers, as you asked me to do.”
“Good,” said Isabel. “And I’ve decided that I’d like to make an offer. I liked it very much. I was going to call you today to talk about what offer we should put in.” Isabel did not like the Scottish system of selling houses. A property went on the market with an invitation for offers, giving a general guide to where offers should start. But then what started was a blind auction: anybody interested in buying it could put in their best offer in a sealed envelope and, at a preordained time, these would be opened and the highest bidder—normally—would win the auction. This was all very well for sellers, but for purchasers it created an agony of uncertainty, driving people to offer the very most they could afford, just in case somebody else came up with a bigger offer.
Simon laughed. “Well, I’m saving you that call—and with good news. The woman who’s selling it . . .”
“Florence Macreadie.”
“Yes,” Simon continued. “Her lawyer telephoned me and said that she would be very happy to sell it to you—and at a price which is actually lower than the current starting price. Ten thousand below, in fact. So it’s yours if you want it.”
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Isabel said nothing as she absorbed this news. She had never been obliged to bid for a house before, but everything that she had heard from friends who had done so had made her dread the process. It seemed that everyone had their stories of missed properties, of offers that had seemed to be high and yet turned out to be far too low, of houses lost to an offer only five pounds higher; and yet here she was being offered a flat in a popular area of town at a sum below the starting price.
“Isabel?”
“Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I was thinking. I was trying to take in what you said to me. Ten thousand . . .”
Simon sounded bemused. “Below. Yes. Ten thousand below.”
So, thought Isabel, she’s desperate to sell. This means that there is some snag. The neighbours? Basil, the cat they met on the stairway? Ground subsidence affecting the foundations of the building? Fulminating wet rot in the roof space?
Simon interrupted her thoughts. “My first reaction, of course, was to assume that there was some problem with the property. It sounded rather as if she wanted to offload it on you.
That’s what I thought at first.”
Precisely, thought Isabel.
“But then,” Simon went on, “her lawyer told me the reason.
She does have a reason, you know.”
“And that would be?”
Simon hesitated. He sounded embarrassed. “Apparently she was very taken with the idea of your living there. She said that she liked the idea of you living there with your young man.
That’s the term she used. Young man. She said that it appealed to her sense of the romantic.”
Isabel stared out of the window at the spruce tree in the 6 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h front garden. A squirrel was sitting nervously on one of the lower branches, its tail twitching in that curious, jerky way, as if tugged by a string.
Simon continued. “I don’t like to pry, of course. It’s no concern of mine. I thought, though, that you were interested in the flat for Grace—”
“Of course I am,” Isabel said quickly. “Young man . . . Look, Simon, this really is rather funny. I asked Jamie, who is indeed a young man, to help me look over the place. He lives round the corner down there. I thought that she got the wrong end of the stick but couldn’t set her right.” She laughed. “So now she wants to help set me up in a love nest.”
Simon cleared his throat. “Well, I must admit that I was rather surprised. Mind you, why not, Isabel? There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do something like that. You’re a very attractive woman. Take a look in a mirror some day. I’m not speaking as your lawyer now, but as a friend . . .”
“It would be interesting,” Isabel said. And she imagined herself—allowed herself to imagine—walking up the steps to the flat to find Jamie already home, inside, welcoming her, and her cooking a meal for the two of them in the kitchen with the late evening light of summer on the rooftops and a glass of wine in her hand and . . .
“But back to the matter at hand,” Simon said. “What do you want to do? Do you want me to accept her offer to sell it to you?”
Isabel was about to say yes, and then she was struck by doubt. Florence Macreadie’s offer was made on the basis of a false assumption. It was true that Isabel had done nothing to encourage the other woman’s false belief, but could she let her act on it? If she did she would be taking advantage of another’s mistake, which surely was wrong. It would be like . . . What T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
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would it be like? Like buying a valuable antique from a vulnerable old person who had no idea of what the thing was worth.
People did that, did they not? Unscrupulous dealers would spot a valuable item in the possession of somebody who had no clue as to its value and they would buy it for a paltry sum. It would be a valid sale from a strictly legal point of view, but morally it was something quite different. If she took the flat from Florence on these terms, then it would be taking something from her which she would not have offered had she known the truth.