But the specks she saw turned out to be part of the design and 2 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h it was set aside for shelving. She picked up another plate. This one was definitely still dirty, and the discovery pleased Grace.
Isabel thought that she could wash up, but she was really no good at it, according to Grace. She had no idea how to load the dishwasher correctly and was always putting things away half-washed. She looked at the plate again, ostentatiously, so that Isabel might see her scrutiny. “A month?” she said as she began to fill the sink with water. “That’s a long stay.”
“She’s my cousin,” said Isabel. “Cousins can stay indefinitely, and sometimes do. They’re different.”
“I wouldn’t care to be away from my own bed for a month,”
said Grace. “And I wouldn’t put up with a cousin who stayed indefinitely.”
“Mimi and Joe are different,” said Isabel. “I like having them to stay. And . . .” She was about to say, “And they’re my guests, after all,” but stopped herself. It was no business of Grace’s how long her guests should stay (and that plate is not dirty, she thought), but that was not the way the house, or Isabel’s life, was ordered. Isabel was Grace’s business, at least in Grace’s mind, and that was the view which prevailed.
Grace dipped the plate into the water and began to scrub at the recalcitrant fragments of food. “What will they do?” she asked. “Not that I’m being nosy.” She cast a glance at Isabel.
“But why do they want to be away from home for that long?”
Isabel folded up her copy of the newspaper. “Dallas in summer is not very pleasant,” she said. “It gets very warm. Baking, in fact. Think of Spain in summer, and then think hotter. Anybody who’s in a position to escape the heat does so.”
She rose from the table. She would usually spend the first half-hour of the morning after Grace’s arrival immersed in the crossword, but today she felt disinclined to follow that routine.
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She felt uneasy about something, and she thought that she might have been unsettled by the news of Cat’s new boyfriend.
Nieces found new boyfriends every day—there was nothing unusual in that; nor was there anything uncommon in the dismissal of one boyfriend in favour of another. From what Eddie had said, Patrick might be an improvement on Cat’s previous boyfriends, and yet, she thought, there is something that makes me feel uneasy; I am not mistaken about this.
She left Grace in the kitchen and went out into the hall.
From behind her she heard Grace switch on the radio, as she often did when engaged in housework. It was a studio discussion, a regular programme in which four or five people were invited to debate issues of the time. They were well-known voices—people who could be counted on to give a view on most things—and Isabel found it irritating. Grace did too, on this occasion, and Isabel heard the radio switched off quickly. She smiled. This was Grace’s reaction to a well-known politician whose voice, she confessed, she could not bear. “I know he can’t help it,” she had said once. “I know it’s not his fault, but I just can’t tolerate the sound of him. And I disagree with everything he says. Everything.”
Isabel moved through to her study, closing the door behind her. The morning’s mail had brought the usual selection of unsolicited manuscripts for the Review of Applied Ethics, which Isabel edited, but it had also brought the proofs of the next issue. The Review had taken to devoting every other issue to a single theme, and the topic for this issue was character and its implications for moral involvement in the world. She extracted the proofs from the padded envelope in which the printer had consigned them. This was always an important moment for her, when she saw the results of her work in printed form. And 2 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the editorial, which she often wrote at the last moment, would be there, in cold print, her own words invested with all the authority that printer’s ink on the page can impart.
She looked at the editorial. It was a curious thing, but she sometimes found it difficult to believe that she had written these editorials, with their carefully balanced appraisal of the arguments that her authors marshalled in their papers. Was this really her, this deliberative, even-handed person who signed the editorial at the bottom Isabel Dalhousie, Editor? She wondered for a moment whether others felt this. Did artists sometimes look at their work and wonder how they did it?
Character, she had written, is a term that almost requires explanation today. It means little to the psychologist, who talks about personality, but to the philosopher it is more than that. You may not be able to create a personality, but you can create a character for yourself.
Had she said that? She had written it almost three months ago and the prose had a somewhat distant feel to it, rather like an old letter filed away. It worried her that she had been too enthusiastic about the possibility of creating character. If character and personality were the same thing, then somebody was wrong: either the psychologists for saying that personality was immutable, or the philosophers for saying that it was malleable.
She was not sure, though, that psychologists said that personality was immutable: some did, perhaps, but others said that personality was just a collection of traits, some of which would be consistent across time and some of which would not.
Isabel had discussed this once before with her friend Richard Latcham, who was a psychiatrist. She had met Richard when she was in Cambridge and they had stayed in touch. A few months ago she had gone to a reunion in Cambridge and he 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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had invited her out to Papworth St. Agnes, where he lived. He had shown her his cars in what he called his motor house, a pagoda-style garage in the grounds of the sixteenth-century manor house. While looking at an old Bristol hard-top that he was restoring, the conversation had got on to effort and to how one might become good at the restoration of cars.
“Even you, Isabel,” Richard had said. “Even you could do this.”
She laughed. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
He said, “You’d learn. I’m not suggesting that you wouldn’t need to learn. But you could make yourself into a mechanic if you wanted to. What are you now? You’re a philosopher, aren’t you? But we can all become something different, can’t we?”
She had looked at the car. On the wall, pinned up, was a photograph of the car before he had started his restoration work. The transformation seemed to bear out what he had said.
But we can’t, she thought. We can’t all become something different. We may try to reinvent ourselves, but we are the same people underneath, incorrigibly so. She had turned to Richard and said as much, and he had reached out as she was speaking and removed a small mark from the bodywork of the fine old car.
“Bats,” he said. “No, that’s not what I think of your view. It’s just the occasional bat gets in here and makes a mess of the cars.”
Isabel thought for a moment. And then she said, “We don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.”
Richard looked at her in surprise, and she laughed. “Sorry,”
she said. “It’s just that somebody once wrote a paper called
‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ A professor of philosophy called Thomas Nagel.”
“And did Professor Nagel reach any conclusion?”
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