The Sunday Philosophy Club (6 page)

John Liamor gathered about him a salon of acolytes. These were students who were as much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas. It
was the seventies, and the frothiness of the previous decade had subsided. What remained to believe in, or indeed to mock? Ambition and personal gain, those heady gods of the following decade, were in the wings, but not centre stage, which made a brooding Irishman with an iconoclastic talent an intriguing option. With John Liamor it was not essential to believe in anything; all that was required was the ability to mock. And that was where his real appeal lay; he could sneer at the sneerers themselves because he was Irish and they, for all their radicalism, were still English and therefore, in his view, irretrievably part of the whole apparatus of oppression.

Isabel did not fit easily into this circle, and people remarked on the unlikely nature of the developing liaison. John Liamor’s detractors, in particular—and he was not popular in his college, nor in the philosophy department—found the relationship a strange one. These people resented Liamor’s intellectual condescension, and its trappings; he read French philosophy and peppered his remarks with references to Foucault. And, for one or two of them at least, those who
really
disliked him, there was something else: Liamor wasn’t English. “Our Irish friend and
his
Scottish friend,” one of the detractors remarked. “What an interesting, interesting couple. She’s thoughtful; she’s reasonable; she’s civil; he’s a jumped-up Brendan Behan. One expects him to break into song at any moment. You know the sort.
I could have cried with pride at the way he died,
and so on. Lots of anger about what we were meant to have done to them back years ago. That sort of thing.”

At times she herself found it surprising that she was so attracted to him. It was almost as if there was nowhere else to go; that they were two people thrown together on a journey, who found themselves sharing the same railway compartment and
becoming resigned to each other’s company. Others found a more prosaic explanation. “Sex,” observed one of Isabel’s friends. “It brings all sorts of people together, doesn’t it? Simple. They don’t have to like each other.”

“THE PYRENEES,”
said Isabel suddenly.

Both Toby and Cat stared at her.

“Yes,” Isabel continued airily. “The Pyrenees. Do you know that I have never been to the Pyrenees? Not once.”

“I have,” said Toby.

“I haven’t,” said Cat. “But I would like to go.”

“We could go together,” Isabel pressed on, adding, “and Toby, too, of course, if you wanted to come, Toby. We could all go climbing. Toby would lead the way and we would all be roped to him. We’d be so safe.”

Cat laughed. “He’d slip, and then we’d all fall to our deaths …” She stopped herself suddenly. The remark had come out without her thinking of it, and now she glanced at Isabel apologetically. The whole point of the evening was to take her aunt’s mind off what had happened in the Usher Hall.

“The Andes,” Isabel said brightly. “Now, I have been to the Andes. And they’re just magnificent. But I could hardly breathe, you know, they are so high.”

“I went to the Andes once,” Toby chipped in. “At university. Our climbing club went. One of the guys slipped and fell. Five hundred feet, if not more.”

There was a silence. Toby looked into his glass, remembering. Cat studied the ceiling.

* * *

AFTER HER GUESTS
had gone, leaving earlier than anticipated, Isabel stood in the middle of the kitchen and stared at the plates stacked above the dishwasher. The evening had not been a conspicuous success. The conversation had picked up slightly over the dinner table, but Toby had gone on at great length about wine—his father was a successful wine importer and Toby worked in the family firm. Isabel saw the way he sniffed at the wine she had poured him, thinking that she might not notice—but she did. There was nothing wrong with it, surely; an Australian cabernet sauvignon, not a cheap one; but then wine people were suspicious of New World wines. Whatever they said to the contrary, there was an ineradicable snobbery in the wine world, with the French in the lead, and she imagined that Toby thought she knew no better than to serve a supermarket red. In fact, she knew more than most about wine, and there was nothing wrong with what she had served.

“Australian,” he had said simply. “South Australian.”

“Rather nice,” said Cat.

Toby ignored her. “Quite a bit of fruit.”

Isabel looked at him politely. “Of course, you’ll be used to better.”

“Good heavens,” said Toby. “You make me sound like a snob. This is perfectly … perfectly all right stuff. Nothing wrong with it.”

He put down his glass. “We had a superb first-growth claret in the office the other day. You wouldn’t believe it. The old man fished it out from somewhere. Covered in dust. It faded pretty quickly, but if you took it before it faded, my God!”

Isabel had listened politely. She felt slightly cheered by his performance as she thought that Cat would be bound to tire of this sort of talk, and of Toby with it. Boredom would set in sooner rather than later, and when that happened it would eclipse whatever
else it was that she liked about him. Could Cat really be in love with him? Isabel thought it was unlikely, as she detected a sensitivity to his faults—the eyes cast ever so slightly upwards, for example—whenever he made a remark which embarrassed her. We are not embarrassed by those we love; we may experience passing discomfort, but it is never embarrassment in the true sense. We forgive them their shortcomings, or we may just never notice them. And she had forgiven John Liamor, of course, even when she had found him one night with a student in his rooms at the college, a girl who giggled and wrapped herself in his discarded shirt, while John merely looked out the window and said, “Bad timing, Liamor.”

It might be simpler, she reflected, not to allow oneself to be in love with anybody; just to be oneself, immune to hurt from others. There were plenty of people like that who seemed content with their lives—or were they? She wondered how many of these people were solitary by choice, and how many were alone because nobody had ever come into their lives and relieved them of their loneliness. There was a difference between resignation, or acceptance, in the face of loneliness and choosing to be solitary.

The central mystery, of course, was why we needed to be in love at all. The reductionist answer was that it was simply a matter of biology, and that love provided the motivational force that encouraged people to stay together to raise children. Like all the arguments of evolutionary psychology, it looked so simple and so obvious, but if that was all that we were, then why did we fall in love with ideas, and things, and places? Auden had captured this potential in pointing out that as a boy he had fallen in love with a pumping engine, and thought it “every bit as beautiful as you.” Displacement, the sociobiologists would say; and there was the old Freudian joke that tennis is a substitute for sex. To which
there was only one reply: that sex could equally well become a substitute for tennis.

“Very funny,” Cat had said when Isabel had once pointed this out to her. “But surely it’s absolutely right. Our emotions all seem geared towards keeping us in one piece, as animals, so to speak. Fear and flight. Fighting over food. Hatred and envy. All very physical and connected with survival.”

“But might one not equally say that the emotions have a role in developing our higher capacities?” Isabel had countered. “Our emotions allow us to empathise with others. If I love another, then I know what it is to be that other person. If I feel pity—which is an important emotion, isn’t it?—then this helps me to understand the suffering of others. So our emotions make us grow morally. We develop a moral imagination.”

“Perhaps,” Cat had said, but she had been looking away then, at a jar of pickled onions—this conversation had taken place in the delicatessen—and her attention had clearly wandered. Pickled onions had nothing to do with moral imagination, but were important in their own quiet, vinegary way, Isabel supposed.

AFTER CAT AND TOBY
had left, Isabel went outside, into the cool of the night. The large walled garden at the back of the house, hidden from the road, was in darkness. The sky was clear, and there were stars, normally not visible in the city, obscured by all the light thrown up by human habitation. She walked over the lawn towards the small wooden conservatory, under which she discovered a fox had recently made its burrow. She had named him Brother Fox, and had seen him from time to time—a svelte creature running sure-footed along the top of the wall or dashing across the road at night, on impenetrable business of its own. She
had welcomed him, and had left a cooked chicken out one night, as an offering. By morning it had disappeared, although she later found a bone in a flower bed, well gnawed, the marrow extracted.

What did she want for Cat? The answer was simple: she wanted happiness, which sounded trite, but was nevertheless true. In Cat’s case, that meant that she should find the right man, because men seemed to be so important to her. She did not resent Cat’s boyfriends—in principle, at least. Had she done so, the cause of her resentment would have been obvious: jealousy. But it was not that. She acknowledged what was important for her niece, and only hoped that she would find out what she was looking for, what she really wanted. In Isabel’s view that was Jamie. And what about myself? she thought. What do I want?

I want John Liamor to walk through the door and say to me: I’m sorry. All these years that we’ve wasted. I’m sorry.

N
OTHING MORE ABOUT
the incident appeared in what Isabel called the “lower papers” (well, they are, she would defend herself: look at their content); and what she referred to as the “morally serious papers,”
The Scotsman
and
The Herald,
were also silent on the subject. For all Isabel knew, McManus might have found out no more, or if he had pieced together a few more scraps of detail, his editor could have deemed it to be too inconsequential to print. There was a limit to what one could make of a simple tragedy, even if it had occurred in unusual circumstances. She assumed that there would be a Fatal Accident Inquiry, which was always held when a death occurred in sudden or unexpected circumstances, and this might be reported when it took place. These were public hearings, before the local judge, the sheriff, and in most cases the proceedings were quick and conclusive. Factory accidents in which somebody was found to have forgotten that a wire was live; a misconnected carbon monoxide extractor; a shotgun that was thought to be unloaded. It did not take too long to unravel the tragedy, and the sheriff would make his determination, as it was called, patiently listing what had gone wrong and what needed to be put right, warning sometimes, but for the most
part not passing much comment. And then the court would move on to the next death, and the relatives of the last would make their way out onto the street in sad little knots of regret. The most likely conclusion in this case would be that an accident had occurred. Because it had taken place so publicly, there might be comments on safety, and the sheriff could suggest a higher rail in the gods. But it could be months before any of this happened, and by then, she hoped, she might have forgotten it.

She might have discussed it again with Grace, but her housekeeper, it appeared, had other things on her mind. A friend was experiencing a crisis and Grace was lending moral support. It was a matter of masculine bad behaviour, she explained; her friend’s husband was going though a midlife crisis and his wife, Grace’s friend, was at her wit’s end.

“He’s bought an entire new wardrobe,” Grace explained, casting her eyes upwards.

“Perhaps he feels like a change of clothing,” ventured Isabel. “I’ve done that myself once or twice.”

Grace shook her head. “He’s bought teenage clothes,” she said. “Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. That sort of thing. And he’s walking around listening to rock music. He goes to clubs.”

“Oh,” said Isabel. Clubs sounded ominous. “What age is he?”

“Forty-five. A very dangerous age for men, we’re told.”

Isabel thought for a moment. What might one do in such a case?

Grace supplied her answer. “I laughed at him,” she said. “I came straight out and said he looked ridiculous. I told him that he had no business wearing teenage boys’ clothing.”

Isabel could picture it. “And?”

“He told me to mind my own business,” Grace said indignantly.
“He said that, just because I was past it, he was not. So I said, past what? And he didn’t reply.”

“Trying,” said Isabel.

“Poor Maggie,” Grace went on. “He goes off to these clubs and never takes her, not that she would want to go anyway. She sits at home and worries about what he’s getting up to. But there’s not much I can do. I did give him a book, though.”

“And what was that?”

“It was a dog-eared old book. I found it in a bookshop in the West Port.
One Hundred Things for a Teenage Boy to Do.
He didn’t think it funny.”