CHAPTER ONE

TAKE ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE ,” said Isabel.

Jamie nodded. “One hundred.”

“Now, out of those one hundred,” Isabel continued, “how many will mean well?”

It was typical of the sort of trying question Isabel asked herself, in the way in which we sometimes ask ourselves questions that admit of no definitive answer. She was an optimist when it came to humankind, unfashionably so, and so she thought the answer was ninety-eight, possibly even ninety-nine. Jamie, the realist, after a few moments’ thought, said eighty.

But this was not a question which could be disposed of so easily; it raised in its wake other, more troubling questions. Were those one or two people the way they were because of the throw of the genetic dice—a matter of patterns and repeats deep in the chemistry of their DNA—or was it something that went wrong for them a long time ago, in some dark room of childhood, and stayed wrong? Of course there was quite another possibility: they chose.

She was sitting in a delicatessen when she remembered this conversation with Jamie. Now, from that convenient vantage point, she looked out of the window—that man who was crossing the road right then, for example; the one with the thin mouth, the impatient manner, and the buttoned collar was perhaps one of that tiny minority of the malevolent. There was something about him, she felt, that made one uneasy; something in his eyes which suggested ruthlessness, a man who would not wait for others, who did not care, who would suffer from road rage even while walking…She smiled at the thought. But there was certainly something unsettling in his demeanour, a hint of poisoned sexuality about him, she felt; a whiff of cruelty, something not quite right.

She looked away; one did not want such a person to see one staring; nor, she reminded herself, did she want to catch herself engaging in such idle speculation. Imagining things about perfect strangers might seem a harmless enough pursuit, but it could lead to all sorts of ridiculous fantasies and fears. And Isabel was aware that of all her manifold failings, thinking too much about things was one of the most egregious.

Of course a delicatessen in Edinburgh was not the most obvious place to entertain such thoughts on the nature of good and evil, but Isabel was a philosopher and knew full well that philosophical speculation came upon one in the strangest places and at the strangest times. The delicatessen was owned by her niece, Cat, and in addition to selling the usual things that such shops sold—the sun-dried tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, the fresh anchovy fillets and the small bars of Austrian marzipan—this delicatessen served coffee at the three or four small marble-topped tables that Cat had found on a trip to the Upper Loire valley and that she had carted back to Scotland in a hired self-drive van.

Isabel was sitting at one of these tables, a freshly made cappuccino before her, a copy of that morning’s Scotsman newspaper open at the crossword page. Her coffee had been made by Cat’s assistant, Eddie, a shy young man to whom something terrible and unexplained had happened some time ago and who was still awkward in his dealings with Isabel and with others. Eddie had gained in confidence recently, especially since he had taken up with a young Australian woman who had taken a job for a few months in the delicatessen, but he still blushed unexpectedly and would end a conversation with a murmur and a turning away of the head.

“You’re by yourself,” said Eddie, as he brought Isabel’s coffee to her table. “Where’s the…” He trailed off.

Isabel smiled at him encouragingly. “The baby? He’s called Charlie, by the way.”

Eddie nodded, glancing in the direction of Cat’s office at the back of the delicatessen. “Yes, of course, Charlie. How old is he now?”

“Three months. More or less exactly.”

Eddie absorbed this information. “So he can’t say anything yet?”

Isabel began to smile, but stopped herself; Eddie could be easily discouraged. “They don’t say anything until they’re quite a bit older, Eddie. A year or so. Then they never stop. He gurgles, though. A strange sound that means I’m perfectly happy with the world. Or that’s the way I understand it.”

“I’d like to see him sometime,” said Eddie vaguely. “But I think that…” He left the sentence unfinished, yet Isabel knew what he meant.

“Yes,” she said, glancing in the direction of Cat’s door. “Well, that is a bit complicated, as you probably know.”

Eddie moved away. A customer had entered the shop and was peering at the counter display of antipasti; he needed to return to his duties.

Isabel sighed. She could have brought Charlie with her, but she had decided against it, leaving him instead at the house with her housekeeper, Grace. She often brought him to Bruntsfield, wheeling him, a wrapped-up cocoon, in his baby buggy, negotiating the edge of the pavement with care, proud in the way of a new mother, almost surprised that here she was, Isabel Dalhousie, with her own child, her son. But on these occasions she did not go into Cat’s delicatessen, because she knew that Cat was still uncomfortable about Charlie.

Cat had forgiven Isabel for Jamie. When it had first become apparent that Isabel was having an affair with him, Cat had been incredulous: “Him? My ex-boyfriend? You?” Surprise had been followed by anger, expressed in breathless staccato: “I’m sorry. I can’t. I just can’t get used to it. The idea.”

There had been acceptance, later, and reconciliation, but by that stage Isabel had announced her pregnancy and Cat had retreated in a mixture of resentment and embarrassment.

“You disapprove,” said Isabel. “Obviously.”

Cat had looked at her with an expression that Isabel found impossible to interpret.

“I know he was your boyfriend,” Isabel continued. “But you did get rid of him. And I didn’t set out to become pregnant. Believe me, I didn’t. But now that I am, well, why shouldn’t I have a child?”

Cat said nothing, and Isabel realised that what she was witnessing was pure envy; unspoken, inexpressible. Envy makes us hate what we ourselves want, she reminded herself. We hate it because we can’t have it.

By the time that Charlie arrived, tumbling—or so it felt to Isabel—into the world under the bright lights of the Royal Infirmary, Cat was talking to Isabel again. But she did not show much warmth towards Charlie; she did not offer to hold him or to kiss him, although he was her cousin. Isabel was hurt by this, but decided that the best thing to do was not to flaunt Charlie before her niece, but allow her to come round in her own time.

“You can’t carry on disliking a baby for long,” said Grace, who, imbued with folk wisdom, was often right about these things. “Babies have a way of dealing with indifference. Give Cat time.”

Time. She looked at her watch. She had put Charlie down for his nap almost two hours ago and he would be waking up shortly. He would want feeding then, and although Grace could cope with that, Isabel liked to do it herself. She had stopped breast-feeding him only a few days after his birth, which had made her feel bad, but the discomfort had been too great and she had found herself dreading the experience. That was not a way to bond with one’s child, she thought; babies can pick up the physical tension in the mother, the drawing back from contact. So she had switched to a baby formula.

Isabel would not leave the delicatessen without exchanging a few words with Cat, no matter how strained relations might be. Now she rose from her table and made her way to the half-open door to the office. Eddie, standing at the counter, glanced briefly in her direction and then looked away again.

“Are you busy?”

Cat had a brochure in front of her, her pen poised above what looked like a picture of a jar of honey.

“Do people buy lots of honey?” Isabel asked. It was a banal question—of course people bought honey—but she needed something to break the ice.

Cat nodded. “They do,” she said, distantly. “Do you want some? I’ve got a sample somewhere here. They sent me a jar of heather honey from the Borders.”

“Grace would,” said Isabel. “She eats a lot of honey.”

There was a silence. Cat stared at the photograph of the jar of honey. Isabel drew in her breath; this could not be allowed to go on. Cat might come round in the end—and Isabel knew that she would—but it could take months; months of tension and silences.

“Look, Cat,” she said, “I don’t think that we should let this go on much longer. You’re freezing me out, you know.”

Cat continued to stare fixedly at the honey. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“But you do,” said Isabel. “Of course you know what I mean. And all that I’m saying is that it’s ridiculous. You have to forgive me. You have to forgive me for having Charlie. For Jamie. For everything.”

She was not sure why she should be asking her niece’s forgiveness, but she was. When it came to forgiveness, of course, it did not matter whether somebody was wronged or not—what counted was whether they felt wronged. That was quite different.

“I don’t have to forgive you,” said Cat. “You haven’t done anything wrong, have you? All you’ve done is have a baby. By my…” She trailed off.

Isabel was astonished. “By your what?” she asked. “Your boyfriend? Is that what you’re saying?”

Cat rose to her feet. “Let’s not fight,” she said flatly. “Let’s just forget it.”

If this had been said with warmth, then Isabel would have been comforted by these words, and relieved. But they were said without passion, and she realised that this was far from a rapprochement; this was a mere changing of the subject. She wanted to protest, to take Cat in her arms and beg her to stop this, but a barrier of animosity, one of those invisible clouds of feeling, stood between them. She turned away. “Will you come round to the house sometime?” she asked. “Come and see us.”

Us. She was getting used to the first person plural, but here, of course, in this atmosphere, it was heavy with significance, a land mine of a word.

She left Cat’s office. Outside, from behind the counter, Eddie looked up and exchanged glances with Isabel. For a young man who everybody imagined understood nothing, he understood everything, thought Isabel.

“HE WAS YELLING his head off,” Grace said. “So I gave him his feed. And since then he’s been perfectly happy. Look.”

Grace had been cradling Charlie in her arms and now handed him over to Isabel in the hall.

“Looking at him now,” said Isabel, “you wouldn’t think it, would you? So much volume in those tiny lungs.”

She carried him through to her study and sat down in the chair near the window. It still felt strange to her to have Charlie in her study, her place of work. Babies belonged to a world of blankets, colour, softness, not to this place of paper, files, telephones. And philosophy, which is what Isabel did as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, seemed so far removed from the world of infancy. Would Immanuel Kant have known how to hold a baby? she asked herself. It was highly unlikely; babies were too irrational, too messy for him, although he would have acknowledged, of course, that each baby should be treated as an end in its own right, and not as a means to an end. So one should have a baby because one wanted that baby to be born and to have a life, not because one wanted the pleasure oneself of having a baby; that was implicit in any Kantian view of the matter. But even if he had acknowledged the essential value of every baby, would Kant have had the faintest idea how to deal with a baby? Would he even have known which side was up? That was the cold and informal face of philosophy, Isabel thought; something far removed from the world that ordinary people knew; their world of struggle, and messy passions, and unresolved pointless differences, such as her difference with Cat. That was Kant’s child-unfriendliness established; Hume would have known about children, she decided. He would have found babies good company because they were full of emotions, unexpressed perhaps, or made known only in the crudest of manners, but emotions nonetheless. And Hume, the Good Davey as he was called, was easy company, of course, and would have been liked by babies.

Content in his mother’s arms, Charlie now seemed to be dropping back to sleep. Isabel watched as his eyelids fluttered and then closed. She could watch him for hours, she thought, whether he was awake or asleep; it was difficult to believe that she—and Jamie, of course—had created this little boy, this person, had started a whole future on its track. That struck her as little short of a miracle; that a few small cells could multiply and differentiate and create an instrument of thought and language, a whole centre of consciousness.

Grace watched her from the doorway. “Would you like me to take him up to his cot?” she asked. “So that you can work?”

Isabel handed the sleeping child over to Grace and went to her desk. Charlie’s birth had had little impact on the Review of Applied Ethics; in her determination to be prepared well in advance, Isabel had put together two special issues during her pregnancy—an issue on moral particularism in the work of Iris Murdoch (“the moral dilemmas of Oxford types,” Jamie had called it) and one on the morality of boundary controls. The Murdoch issue had gone to press shortly after Charlie’s birth, and the second would be published within a month or two. It had caused her some anxiety, this second one, because the topic was such an uncomfortable one. States are entitled to have some control over their borders—there is general agreement on that—but when they try to keep people out, then passions are raised and accusations of heartlessness made. Auden had a poem about this, which she quoted in her editorial. He had written from the perspective of a displaced person who hears the rhetoric of hate of his persecutors; and there is that arresting line that brings it home so strongly: “He was talking of you and me, my dear,” says the man to his wife. You and me: at the end of every bit of exclusion, every act of ethnic cleansing, every flourish of heartlessness, there is a you and me.

And yet, she reflected, that was written in an era of Fascism. Modern states and their officials act very differently; they have to make difficult decisions against a backdrop of human rights laws and openness. We could not all go and live in the United States or Canada or Australia, or some other popular country, even if we wanted to. At some point the people already there were entitled, were they not, to say that there were limited resources for newcomers, that their societies could take no more. Or they could argue that even if they had the space, they were entitled to preserve the existing culture of their country by controlling the extent to which others came to it; we live here, they might say—it’s ours and we can decide whom to invite in. But then somebody might point out that the current possessors themselves, or their ascendants, had probably taken the land from somebody else, and it was not clear why that should give them the right to turn away those who came later. But history might provide few firm foundations: ultimately, almost everybody came from somewhere else, if one went far enough back, and even those who asserted their rights as original peoples were often not really indigenous, but had sailed over from some other island or walked across a long-dissolved land bridge.

Isabel found this intensely difficult, and had noticed that most people simply avoided the issue or did not discuss it in the open. The heart went one way—those who want a new life should be helped to get it, if possible—but the head might look in another direction, at the pragmatic impossibility of allowing the unfettered movement of peoples. So there were passports and quotas and restrictions, all of which amounted to a discouragement. Please don’t come, these regulations said; please don’t ask.

She looked at the room around her, at her desk, at her books. None of this would belong to her forever; it would change hands and somebody new would be here, somebody who would not even know who she had been, somebody who would look at her with astonishment if she came back, in some thought experiment, and said, That’s my desk—I want it. Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.

Still deep in thought, Isabel stared at the pile of unopened mail. The harvest of just two days, it was neatly stacked in a red metal in-tray. Much of this was manuscripts; Isabel did not accept electronic submissions to the journal—she disliked reading on-screen—and required everything that was submitted to be printed out for her perusal. This meant that a river of paper entered the house each month, swirled in eddies about her study for a week or so, and then was guided out in a stream of recycling bags. The rejected manuscripts, those that she judged unworthy of the editorial board’s scrutiny, were often the work of doctoral students, anxious for their first publication. Isabel was gentle in her rejection of these, expressing the hope that the authors would find somebody else willing to publish their work. She knew that this was unlikely, that the Review may have been their fifth or sixth port of call. But she could not be brutal; she had been a doctoral student herself once and remembered what it was like.

She took an envelope off the top of the pile and slit it open. “Dear Ms. Dalhousie, The enclosed paper may be suitable for publication in the Review of Applied Ethics and I should be grateful if you would consider it. The title is ‘The Concept of Sexual Perversion as an Oppressive Weapon’ and in it I examine some ideas which Scruton advanced in his book Sexual Desire. As you know, the concept of perversion has been subjected to critical reassessment…”

She sighed and laid the paper aside. She received numerous submissions on the subject of sex; indeed, some philosophers seemed to imagine that applied ethics was more or less exclusively concerned with sex. Often these papers were interesting, but on other occasions they were distinctly scatological and she wondered whether she should be reading them with gloves on. The absurdity of this struck her as quickly as the thought itself came to her, but it was amusing to think of editors handling such material with the protection of gloves, as if the grubbiness of the subject matter might rub off or infection might leap from the page.

A few days previously she had received a paper entitled “On the Ethics of Pretending to Be Gay When You Are Not.” If she had been taken by surprise by this title, then that was clearly the author’s intention. We expect the issue to be the ethics of pretending to be straight when you are not, he wrote, but that assumes that there is something shameful about not being straight. The conventional question, then, connives in the marginalisation of the gay, and therefore any consideration of this form of passing should be from a viewpoint which recognises that some may wish to pass for gay rather than the other way round.

She smiled at the recollection of that paper, which she had circulated to the members of the editorial board for their verdict. The board would recommend publication, Isabel thought, even if they were not impressed by the content. “That’s exactly the sort of paper we should encourage,” one member of the board had already written. “We need to show people that we are not, as some suggest, old-fashioned in our approach.” This comment had come from Professor Christopher Dove, a professor of philosophy at a minor English university, and a man with a reputation for radicalism. It had been a dig at Isabel, who was herself thought by Dove to be old-fashioned. And she had risen to the occasion in her reply. “Thank you for your support,” she had written. “I wondered whether members of the board were ready for this sort of thing. I’m glad to see they now are.”

She picked up the next item, a bulky brown envelope which would contain, she thought, a catalogue of some sort. It did: Lyon & Turnbull, Forthcoming Sales. Lyon & Turnbull were a prominent Edinburgh auction house at whose sales Isabel had bought the occasional item, thus entitling her to their catalogues. This one was for a sale of furniture described as “good antique furniture” and paintings, neither of which Isabel actually needed—in fact the house had too much furniture and too many paintings. But she found auction catalogues irresistible, even if she had no intention of buying anything.

She skipped through the pages of furniture, pausing only to study more closely a set of library steps in mahogany, with brass fittings. The estimate seemed discouragingly high, and she moved on to the paintings. That was where she stopped. Lot number 87 was a painting of a man standing on a shore, a stack of lobster creels just behind him, and behind the creels a mountain rising sharply. It was unmistakably the landscape of the Western Highlands of Scotland, with its grey rocks protruding from thin soil, the verdant green of the grass, the gentle, shifting light; and the man’s face, with its weather-beaten look, further proclaimed the place. She looked at the description underneath: Andrew McInnes, Scottish, b. 1958, Sea Livelihood. Below this, in smaller type, the auctioneers went on to explain: “McInnes was perhaps the most talented of the students to have passed through the Edinburgh College of Art in the last years of Robin Philipson’s tenure as principal. He rapidly acquired a substantial reputation, and this was reflected in the prices achieved by his paintings during the years immediately before his death.”

Isabel studied the painting intently. It was the expression on the man’s face that interested her. This was a man who knew hardship, but was not bowed by it. And there was a kindness too, a gentleness that was sometimes squeezed out of those who wrested their living from a hard place—the sea or a windswept island.

She reached for the telephone and dialled Jamie’s number. At the other end of the line, the phone rang for a long time and she was about to put the handset down when Jamie suddenly answered. He sounded breathless.

“You’ve just run up the stairs,” she said. “Do you want me to call back later?”

“No, I’ll be all right. I heard it when I was on the way up and then I couldn’t get my key into the lock for some reason. But it’s all right now.”

Isabel looked at her watch. It was eleven thirty. She could put Charlie into his baby sling and take him with her; he slept very contentedly in the sling because, she thought, he could hear her heartbeat and he imagined he was back in the womb, back to the simpler life that perhaps he remembered—just—and missed.

“Would you like to see your son for lunch?” she asked.

“Of course,” Jamie answered quickly. She knew he would say that, and it gave her satisfaction. He loved Charlie, which was what she wanted. It did not matter whether or not he loved her—and she did not know whether he did—the important thing was that he loved Charlie.

“And we could drop into Lyon & Turnbull beforehand,” Isabel suggested. “There’s something I want to look at.”

“I’ll meet you there,” said Jamie.

She put the telephone down and smiled. I am very fortunate, she thought. I have a child, and I also have a lover who is the father of the child. I have a large house and a job that allows me to do philosophy. I am happy.

She moved to the window and looked out into the garden. The summer profusion of shrubs made shadows on the ground below. There was a fuchsia, laden with red and purple flowers, and beside it a large rhododendron bush, popular with small birds. When they alighted on the foliage of the rhododendron, these birds made the topmost branches bend almost imperceptibly under their tiny weight. But now the lower branches, those right down by the ground, moved suddenly, and for another reason. And I have a fox, she whispered. I have a fox who watches over my life.