Isabel took a sip of her tea; it was too cold. Millie had always been a hopeless cook, and this inability obviously extended to the making of tea. Her friend was not domestic in any way; a quick glance around the room was enough to confirm that. It was tidy enough, she supposed, but it had an air of not being lived in, of being ignored; it was the home of an ascetic. Poor Millie, she thought … and stopped herself. One should not think poor of anybody; it was condescending, and Millie’s life was, after all, what she had chosen for herself. She was happy enough with it, Isabel imagined, even if it did involve her clinging by her fingernails.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Isabel said.
Millie raised a polite eyebrow. “Please talk.”
“About one of your colleagues.”
Millie laughed. “Oh, that’s going to be fun. Where should we start?”
“It’s a serious question,” said Isabel.
Millie put on a look of mock apology. “Of course. They’re very serious people.”
“George MacLeod,” said Isabel.
The mention of the name had a marked effect on Millie—but only for a moment or two. It was as if a shadow passed over her face, a darkness; but it passed quickly and her expression became bright again. “George is a very competent philosopher,” she said. “Some would even go so far as to say that he’s a distinguished philosopher.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Isabel. “I happen to be familiar with some of his work.”
Millie seemed pleased to hear it. Isabel wondered why. Were they allies? Academic departments tended to be riven with divisions; people belonged to factions, and had complicated loyalties. Did Millie need George’s support if she were ever to get a permanent post? Did George need Millie’s backing for some scheme or other?
“I met him for the first time the other day,” said Isabel. “We had coffee together. We talked about all sorts of things.”
Millie nodded. “I like the Elephant House,” she said.
Isabel explained the strange circumstances of the meeting. “An over-enthusiastic computer program,” she said. “But I’m glad that it invited me. I’m asking him to do some reviewing for me.”
“He’ll do that well,” said Millie.
There was a short silence. Isabel took a sip of her tea. She decided she would tell Millie exactly what happened, and she did. When it came to the telephone call, she gave her reaction. “I felt outraged,” she said. “I was accused of something of which I was entirely innocent.”
Millie watched her. “Innocence implies guilt,” she said quietly. “You don’t need to assert innocence until there is reason for guilt.” She spoke as if she were thinking aloud, engaging in some sort of soliloquy to order her thoughts.
“Well, I was innocent,” said Isabel. “What a cheek! Phoning me up like that, out of the blue, and accusing me of carrying on with her husband.”
Millie nodded. Isabel thought that she seemed preoccupied.
“I wondered,” she continued, “I wondered whether you thought George capable of having an affair? Do you think he is? Do you think that she has good reason to be suspicious?”
Millie did not answer, but looked away, out of the window. Suddenly she rose to her feet and began to haul in the washing from the line outside. “It could rain,” she said. “I must get this stuff in.”
Isabel glanced at the sky, which was empty. “It won’t rain,” she said. “There isn’t a cloud in the sky. Look.”
“You never know,” said Millie, taking the shapeless, rather grey vest off the line. She turned to Isabel. “She’s the one who’ll be having the affair,” she said. “She’s the one. Can’t you see? The reason why she’s accusing him is that she’ll be having an affair with somebody. She’s done it before, you know. Spectacularly. Several times.”
“Spectacularly?”
Millie regained her seat. “Yes. The last time was with the window cleaner. I ask you, Isabel: the window cleaner! How tawdry can you get?”
“They clean windows,” said Isabel. “It’s a perfectly honest job.”
“Of course it is. It’s just so … so tawdry. You see the window cleaner on the other side of the window and think: That’s somebody I need to have an affair with. How tawdry.”
Isabel thought about this for a moment. She was somewhat surprised to see Millie so exercised. “But we all meet the people we have affairs with somehow. What’s the difference between meeting them at parties or … or at work?”
Millie glanced at her. “Around the photocopying machine?”
Isabel shrugged. “Or the coffee machine. Those are romantic spots.”
Millie closed her eyes for a moment. Isabel watched her. We don’t look at our friends, she thought. We don’t stare at them as we stare at paintings in a gallery, taking in the details. But of course we can’t do that because it would seem so … so odd, so disconcerting. I have never looked at you, Millie, she said to herself. I have never really looked at you, with your peculiar cardigan and your hair in a mess, like the nest of some badly organised bird, and your bare feet of which you have for some reason painted the nails of the big toes and left the others natural. Oh, Millie, how could you ever expect a man to take an interest? If that was what you wanted—but it was, because one evening you confessed it to me, and said that there was some Greek exchange student who had broken your heart and gone back to Greece. And you had cried because you imagined that he had returned to the glamorous Greek girl he had once mentioned, just casually, adding that her father owned a small island. And I thought: How can one compete with somebody whose father owns an island …?
“She’s having an affair,” Millie said. “Forget about him. It’s much more likely that it’s her.”
Isabel did not reply for a few moments, and then she said, “Maybe.”
Millie, though, was adamant. “Not maybe. Definitely.”
“Could they both be having an affair? Isn’t that possible?”
Millie was noncommittal. “I suppose we shouldn’t underestimate the deviousness of our fellow human beings.” She paused. “And that proposition certainly applies to colleagues. Isn’t it interesting?”
Isabel suggested there was a simple explanation: We saw the faults in colleagues because our engagement with them was inherently competitive. Millie agreed. “I suppose I stand to benefit if one of my colleagues were to fall under a bus.” She smiled at Isabel as she spoke. “Not that I’m accusing bus drivers of being particularly dangerous—I’m not—but in a purely metaphorical sense if one of our senior professors were to meet a premature end then the rest would be promoted and there would be a permanent place for me at the bottom of the ladder. Even the first rung would do. The first rung of any ladder is a lovely place to be, believe me. I dream of it, Isabel. But I mustn’t think like that, must I?”
As Millie spoke, Isabel found herself imagining Professor Lettuce, the former chairman of her editorial board and an unscrupulous, scheming man, falling under a lumbering double-decker bus, arms flailing as he disappeared under the wheels. The bus was red because Lettuce lived in London, somewhere near Richmond, or was it Wimbledon? And really he should live near Covent Garden, because that had been a vegetable market and vegetable markets were appropriate places for lettuces. She stopped herself. It was an uncharitable thought, and a childish one, a reversion to the infantile habit of picturing those one disliked with no clothes on, something one did at the age of eight, perhaps, and then grew out of; except one did not always grow out of the things one did as a child, not by any means. Isabel still looked under the bed from time to time, as she suspected we all did. And why not? There could well be occasions when people looked under the bed and saw something that they would not otherwise have seen—a burglar, perhaps, disturbed when the householder came home, and now hiding in the first place he could find. Cupboards were not a suitable place for burglars to hide as cupboards were already occupied by paramours—or they were in French farces—and if the cupboards were full of shivering, fearful lo
vers, cold because their clothes were in a pile behind the door, then there would be no room for burglars. Unless the burglars slipped into the cupboards and made a hushing gesture to the lovers hidden there, as if to say: We’re all in this together; you keep quiet about me and I’ll keep quiet about you.
While she was thinking of all this, Isabel’s gaze had shifted from her friend and she was now staring out of the window. “It could rain,” said Millie. “Those clouds over there are almost purple, aren’t they?”
Isabel came to; she had not noticed the clouds. “Yes. It could rain.” She turned her head and saw Millie looking at her in a bemused fashion.
“You’re exactly like me, Isabel. You get lost in your thoughts. Don’t deny it.”
Isabel laughed. “I have no reason to deny anything. It’s not an accusation. We are, after all, philosophers, you and I, and if we didn’t get lost in our thoughts, then we wouldn’t be doing our job.”
Millie inclined her head gravely. “I suppose you’re right. But I still feel slightly furtive about doing it. I don’t know why, but I do.”
“It’s because there are plenty of things clearly intended to prevent people from serious thinking.”
“Such as?”
“Advertising. Pressure to consume and to define oneself by consumption. Celebrity culture and all the shallowness that goes with it. Electronic noise of various descriptions. Piped music in shops and restaurants. I could go on.”
Millie glanced up at the ceiling. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.” She looked back at Isabel. “Oh well.”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “Oh well.”
Millie brightened. “And little Charlie? What’s he up to? Is he speaking?”
Isabel explained about Charlie’s latest pronouncement. Brother Fox, he had said, was good.
“Just that? Just good?”
“But it’s true,” said Isabel. “Brother Fox is good. He has no conception of evil or wrongdoing. And Charlie understood that, I think.”
Millie suddenly reached out to touch Isabel. They were sitting at opposite ends of Millie’s rather dilapidated sofa—Isabel was sure that she was directly above a broken spring—and Millie reached out and touched her lightly on the arm.
“You’re so lucky,” she said. “You have that little boy. And you have Jamie. And you have …” She tailed off.
Isabel’s heart went out to her friend. “But you have so much too,” she said gently. “You have an interesting job, even if it’s not as secure as you’d like it to be. And you have this place. That view out there. And your students love you, you know.”
Millie nodded. “Yes. Of course.”
“That means a lot,” said Isabel.
“Does it?” Millie mused. “Do you think that they’d miss me if … if I fell under a bus?”
They both laughed, and the tension that had suddenly developed disappeared.
“They would, absolutely.”
“But perhaps it depends on which bus I were to fall under,” said Millie. “Timing is all—isn’t that what they say? Isn’t that the conventional wisdom?”
A few minutes later, Isabel was making her way down the common stair of Millie’s tenement building. The stair was made of ancient stone that had been worn away by the footfall of several hundred years of inhabitants, generations who had occupied the building, trudging up and down these steps on their way in and out of a world that was so very different from today’s. The stone had that curious, almost indefinable smell to it, unlike anything other than the smell of a Scottish tenement stair: the scent of dust and damp combined; not an unpleasant smell, but a cold one, if smells can be cold or hot.
At the foot of the stair, she pushed open the heavy door on its protesting, now buckled hinges, and as she did so she remembered something that Millie had said. It was important, and for a moment she hesitated as she debated with herself whether to go back up and ask her about it. But she decided not to do so, and instead stepped out onto the pavement, on which she saw that children had drawn in wavering lines their hopscotch squares. The coloured chalk was still visible, though the rain that had fallen the day before had blurred the lines, run blue into white and red into green. The drawings of children arrest us, she thought; as effortlessly as the greatest paintings—a Michelangelo in all its glory, a Vermeer in all its understated purity—they arrest us.
JAMIE WAS WITH CHARLIE IN THE GARDEN. Isabel joined them, bending down to pick up Charlie as he launched himself, unsteadily, at her legs. He hugged her legs possessively, like a terrier, and she sometimes had to prise the little boy’s arms open to pick him up and return the hug.
“We found a couple of feathers from some bird,” said Jamie. “Charlie wanted to put them back.”
“On the bird?”
“Yes, on the bird.”
She ran her fingers through Charlie’s hair; he nestled his face against hers. He was so precious—so utterly precious—and he would have to learn soon enough about loss, about the fact that things could be destroyed, could be broken. That was a hard lesson, made all the more difficult by the realisation that some things could not be repaired, even by apparently omnipotent parents.
They walked back towards the house, with Isabel carrying Charlie. He was becoming tired—she could tell—and she imagined that he would not object to being put down for his afternoon sleep. He did not, and after she had put the small boy on his bed, accompanied by his favourite stuffed toy, increasingly threadbare from all the love given it, she joined Jamie in his music room. He was standing by the window looking at what seemed to her to be an impossibly complicated score.
“How can you play that?” she asked, peering over her shoulder. “It makes me feel dizzy just to look at it.”
He shrugged. “It’s not too bad. Mostly scales, up and down, if you look closely. See here? See this passage?” He pointed to a sharply ascending and descending line of demisemiquavers. She stared at his pointing finger, at his lightly tanned skin, so perfect. He paused, and then, looking up at her, enquired about Millie. “Usual mess?”
Isabel nodded. “I asked her about George MacLeod.”
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“She said that his wife was more likely to be having an affair than George. She said that she’s somewhat notorious for it. Apparently she had an affair with the window cleaner.”
Jamie laughed. “What a cliché.”
“Yes, but then many affairs are clichés, aren’t they? The middle-aged man goes off with his younger secretary; the bored, neglected wife takes up with the tennis coach. Clichés are clichés precisely because they refer to what actually happens.”
He replaced the score on the shelf. “All right, but even if she has had affairs in the past, that does not stop her being jealous of him. And the reason why she took up with other men might be because of his unfaithfulness. So where does that leave things?”
He did not give Isabel time to answer. “It means that you should keep out of it. Leave it alone. Forget about it.”
Isabel sighed. “I’d like to.”
Jamie turned and put his arms round her. “Isabel, darling Isabel, there are some things best left well alone. I think this is one of them. These people are … well, it sounds as if they’re trouble.”
She nestled her head against his shoulder, as Charlie did to her. We can so easily revert to a childlike dependence, she thought. The temptation was always there to say: You tell me what to do; you tell me. It was like going to a lawyer, or an accountant, and saying: Please sort out the mess; and they did. Put the feathers back on the bird; make everything all right again.
Partly in response to Jamie’s advice, and partly because she could not think of any other way of dealing with the situation, Isabel did nothing. Occasionally she reflected on the injustice of having unfounded allegations standing against her, but she tried not to brood, and largely succeeded. It was a busy time, with a new issue of the Review of Applied Ethics about to go to press, and her mind had plenty of oth
er things to occupy it. But ten days or so later, when Isabel was in the supermarket in Morningside, a woman approached her and introduced herself as Roz MacLeod.
Isabel tried to smile. “Oh …”
“It’s not every day,” Roz said quietly, “that one gets to look one’s enemy in the face.”
Isabel felt her heart hammering within her. “Enemy? I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you mean.” She noticed that Roz was neither pushing a shopping trolley nor holding a basket. Had she followed her into the supermarket? Was this an entirely coincidental meeting?
“You know exactly what I mean,” said Roz. “My husband.”
Isabel struggled to master her fear. “Listen, Mrs. MacLeod, I assure you I have absolutely no contact with your husband. I’ve met him once. Once. That’s all. And we talked about professional matters. That’s the extent of our contact.” As she spoke, she noticed that Roz had a slight facial tic—an eyelid that seemed to move on its own.
“And the letter?”
“What letter?” Even as she answered, Isabel remembered. “Oh, that? It was about a book review that he’s doing for a journal I edit.”
“But you said that you had no other contact, didn’t you? That wasn’t true, was it?”
She felt a mounting irritation. “I forgot about it. And it was professional. Why don’t you read it? Or maybe you have.”
The suggestion that Roz read her husband’s mail had a marked effect, and Isabel was encouraged. Roz seemed to shrink, to draw back; as any bully does, thought Isabel.
“I haven’t …”
Isabel pressed home her advantage. “Then how did you know about it? And anyway, I don’t have to answer to you, or anybody else, about my purely professional dealings. And you have no right to make totally unfounded—”
She did not finish. The other woman suddenly raised her hands to cover her face. She began to sob.
Isabel looked about her. Nearby, an elderly woman, reaching out for a can of beans from her shelf, caught her eye. It was a look of sympathy. Beyond the woman, standing in front of a trolley laden with cans, a teenage shelf-stacker glanced at Roz and then continued to shift the cans onto the shelves. Isabel thought: He finds it strange that we people—we adults—have scenes like this in supermarkets. What have we got to cry about?