“I can’t remember,” she said, which was not true. And she thought: Why should I feel inclined to lie in a matter as petty as this? So she said, “Actually, I was speaking to Eddie and I asked where you were. He mentioned Patrick.”
Cat was silent.
“It would be nice to meet him,” Isabel went on. She tried to sound unconcerned, as if meeting Patrick was not all that important. “You could bring him round, perhaps.”
“All right,” said Cat. “Whenever you like.”
After that the conversation trailed off. No date was chosen for Cat to bring Patrick to meet Isabel, but Isabel made a mental note to herself to call Cat the following day and suggest an evening. She did not want to press her, as she was meant not to be too interested in something which was none of her business.
She thought of Richard Latcham’s lying patient and his struggle to tell the truth. This was not a great moral battle that she faced, the battle not to get involved in matters that did not concern her; it was really quite a small one. But it was nonetheless her battle; unless, of course, one took the view that it was entirely natural to be interested in her niece’s boyfriends.
Grace came into the room. “Was that Cat?” she asked.
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Isabel took out a bowl and began to help Grace to soup. “It was,” she answered.
Grace opened a cupboard to put away a duster she had been carrying. “I met her new boyfriend,” she said casually. “I was passing by the deli and I popped in. He was there.”
Isabel looked down at her soup. “And?”
“He’s called Patrick,” she said. “And he seemed all right.”
“Oh,” said Isabel. “Well, that’s something.”
“Apparently Jamie knows him too,” Grace volunteered.
“They were at school together. Same age. Twenty-eight.”
This was unexpected information, so Isabel again said,
“Oh,” and continued with her soup. That gave her something to think about, and she did so, while Grace continued to talk about something that had happened at her spiritualist meeting the previous evening. The medium—somebody new, said Grace, somebody from Inverness (and they’re all a bit fey up there, she added)—had contacted the cousin of a young man who had been coming to the meetings for weeks but who had never said a word until then.
“At the end of the meeting he had changed completely,”
said Grace. “He said that he had blamed himself in some way for his cousin’s death and now the cousin had reassured him that it was all right.”
Isabel half listened. To be forgiven from beyond the grave could be important if that was the only quarter from which forgiveness could come, which, for many of us, she reflected, might well be the case.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
E
THERE’S SOMETHING I don’t quite understand,” said Jamie.
“I hope you don’t mind my talking about it. But I just don’t see why you should be doing this.”
They were sitting in a small pâtisserie round the corner from St. Stephen Street. The early afternoon light filtered through a corner of the window, illuminating floating particles of dust in the air; there was a smell of freshly made coffee in the air, and vanilla from the pastries. On the table behind them the day’s newspapers were untidily folded, outraged headlines half obscured by creases in the paper: warns . . . resignation . . .
erupts in somalia . . .
Isabel leaned back in her chair. “It’s because it’s Grace,” she said. “I don’t want to sound like the on-duty philosopher, but, frankly, I have a moral obligation to her.” And Somalia? she thought. What about Somalia? There was a book somewhere in the house, a book that had belonged to her father, which bore the title A Tear for Somalia. Did we owe it our tears?
Jamie continued, “But buying a flat . . .” He trailed off. It was an expensive gift, it seemed to him, and although he knew 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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that Isabel was generous, this seemed to be generosity taken too far. “How much is it going to cost you? Two hundred thousand?”
Isabel looked away. She did not like talking about money, and in particular she did not like talking about actual figures. It could be more than two hundred thousand, but the funds were there and she thought that what she did with them was her own affair.
“It could cost that,” she said quietly.
“And that’s an awful lot of money,” said Jamie. “A quarter of a million pounds. Just about.”
Isabel shrugged. “That’s what flats cost in this city,” she said.
“Why can’t Grace get a mortgage? Like everybody else?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question, and one which Isabel had asked herself. But the answer was that Grace was reluctant to take on debt and Isabel had given her word to her father that she would do what was necessary to look after her. In Isabel’s view, that meant that she needed to provide her with a roof over her head. And even if she had not made that promise, she would probably have done it anyway.
“Grace is not the sort of person who would like a mortgage,”
said Isabel.
Jamie frowned. “Well, all right. But why you? Why do you have to do it?”
Isabel looked quizzically at Jamie. “Are you trying to protect me?” she asked.
Jamie said nothing for a while, but then a smile broke out on his face. “I suppose I am,” he muttered. “You do some . . .
some odd things.” Then he added, “Sometimes.”
“Well, that’s very reassuring,” said Isabel. “I’m busy trying to do something for Grace. You’re busy trying to do something for 3 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h me. And Grace, in her own inimitable way, spends a lot of time trying to look after me and you too—to an extent. A nice illustration of what moral community is all about.”
The flat she was to look at that day was halfway along St.
Stephen Street, a street of second-hand shops and bars; a street which prided itself on its slightly bohemian character yet was too expensive for students who might fancy living in such a quarter. People who lived there had to tolerate a certain amount of noise from the bars and the restaurants, but enjoyed, in return, the convenience of the coffee shops and bakeries round the corner, and the sheer beauty of the architecture, which was classical Georgian. Isabel was not sure about it as an address for Grace, who might be hoping for something more conventional, but thought that she would take a look at it, in case it proved to be suitable. The price was about right, and she had been told that she might even be able to lower it if she found cause to shake her head and complain about something.
She had asked Jamie to look at the flat with her because she thought that his local knowledge might help. Jamie lived in Saxe-Coburg Street, which was only a couple of blocks away to the north, and he often walked along St. Stephen Street on his way into town. He had known some people who lived there, he said, and they had talked to him about the locality, although he was having difficulty remembering what they had said. “I think they liked it,” he said. “Or did they say they didn’t? Sorry, I just can’t remember.”
That had not been very helpful, and it had reminded Isabel, inconsequentially, of Wittgenstein’s account of his last meeting with Gottlob Frege. “The last time I saw Frege,” he said, “as we were waiting at the station for my train, I said to him, ‘Don’t you ever find any difficulty in your theory that numbers are objects?’
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