The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (2 page)

Isabel looked thoughtful. “Division. It sounds impressive, but is it all that unusual?”

Jamie shrugged. “I asked them at the nursery school. They said children of four should
be able to add and count up to five. They said nothing about division, or multiplication.
Just counting.”

“Or the piano,” added Isabel.

“Or that. I told them that he can do a C major scale and they said something about
his hands still being quite small and it must be difficult for that reason. They didn’t
seem all that interested.”

Isabel imagined that there were numerous parents who believed their children to have
prodigious skills and boasted to teachers about it. She did not want to be one of
them; and yet if the child was really talented, then shouldn’t the nursery at least
know?

From upstairs there came the sound of a high-pitched voice—something between a chuckle
and a shout. Charlie was awake.

“I’ll go,” said Jamie.

Isabel nodded. “We’ll need to talk about it. About what we do—if anything.”

He gave her a searching look. “Do about what? About his being good at numbers? You
think we should ignore it rather than encourage it?”

“I’m just not sure that it’s in his interests. Would he be any happier if we encouraged
him to be a mathematical prodigy?” And there was something else that worried her:
being a pushy
mother. All mothers were pushy to an extent: one did not have to look far in the natural
world to see mothers being pushy for their offspring—any self-respecting lioness would
make sure her cubs got their fair share—but there were limits … “I don’t think we
should push him too much.”

Jamie frowned. He encountered pushy parents in his work, and one in particular came
to mind. She had written to him recently asking whether her son’s innate musical ability
was being adequately recognised and whether he was ready for a public performance.
Jamie did not want the stage of the Usher Hall for Charlie, although if it came to
that, he and Isabel would of course be in the front row. And Charlie would come onstage
and need a box to stand on to climb on to the piano stool; or perhaps have his teddy
bear carefully seated on the stool next to him while the conductor raised his baton
to bring the accompanying orchestra to order. The frown became a smile. “Can one ignore
something like that? Wouldn’t that be to waste it?”

Isabel did not have time to answer. Another cry came from Charlie, more urgent now,
followed by a rattling of the bars at the top of his bed. Jamie began to leave the
kitchen but turned at the door and said, “Mozart was quite happy being Mozart, you
know. He liked billiards. He kept a canary—and a horse. He enjoyed practical jokes.”

Isabel reflected on this while Jamie was upstairs. To play billiards, to keep a canary
and a horse, and to enjoy practical jokes—were very ordinary things like that the
recipe for an enjoyable life?

THAT CONVERSATION WITH JAMIE
about mathematical ability took place on one of Isabel’s working days. Jamie, who
was
a musician, kept irregular hours, and frequently had days when not only did he not
have any rehearsal or performance commitments, but he also had no teaching. He taught
bassoon at the Edinburgh Academy and had a number of private pupils too, but he managed
to cram all his teaching into two mornings and one afternoon a week, which left three
weekdays for other things. Those days might easily have filled up with session work
or preparation for concerts, but times were hard and there seemed less and less of
that work around. “Perhaps the music’s stopped,” he remarked to Isabel. She had assured
him that music seemed to continue in the face of every difficulty, just as philosophy
did. “We imagine our crises are unlike all other crises,” she said. “But they aren’t.
There’s always been uncertainty. There’s always been danger. It’s the human condition—the
normal one, perhaps.”

On Jamie’s free days, he took over responsibility for Charlie, allowing Isabel to
attend to her job as editor, and owner too, of the
Review of Applied Ethics
. Charlie now went to a small nursery school round the corner, and Jamie would take
him there at eight-thirty in the morning, deposit him in the classroom with his neatly
packed tiffin box, and then return for him five hours later. After lunch, while Isabel
worked in her study on the latest issue of the
Review
, Jamie would often supervise Charlie’s afternoon rest, read to him, play the piano
with him, or take him for a walk by the canal or, as a special treat, to Blackford
Pond. That pond, inhabited by a tribe of over-fed and demanding ducks, could keep
Charlie amused for hours, and Jamie knew every inch of its muddy shore quite as well
as an experienced mariner knows the bays and inlets of his native waters. He had also
come to know the personalities of the various ducks and
could identify where each stood in order of precedence. Size, it seemed, was the sole
determinant of that.

Even though she had made an early start while it was still comparatively cool, already
the weather was making it difficult for Isabel to work. She had opened her study windows,
but there was only an intermittent breeze and the air inside was heavy. Her study
had a particular smell to it—the smell of paper, she had decided—and for some reason
this oppressed her. Perhaps it was not a day on which to sequester oneself inside;
perhaps it was simply not a day on which to do philosophy. Her friend, Julian Baggini,
who, like her, edited a philosophical paper, seemed to be able to do his thinking
in all sorts of circumstances—in the car, in a train, in the bath—but it was different
for Isabel. It was true that thoughts came to her at the oddest of moments, but what
she called
organised thinking
needed the time and place to be right; and the thinking she was trying to do that
day—assessing submissions for a future issue of the
Review
—was definitely organised thinking.

She got up from her desk, putting aside the paper she had been trying to read. There
was nothing wrong with the paper itself, which was a discussion of responsibility
to future generations; there was no reason why it should not see the light of day.
The author was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and needed publications
for the next stage of her career. Isabel knew just how competitive the academic world
could be and just how easily people could fall at any of the fences that stood between
them and a career as a philosopher. She was aware that the author would be waiting
anxiously for her verdict, and that a positive answer would lead to the popping of
champagne corks, real or metaphorical, in some apartment
in Toronto. All that was required was a one-word email:
Yes
. One word, three letters, that would bring such joy to somebody she had never met
and probably never would. And by the same token,
No
would have the opposite effect.

She had found it difficult to concentrate on the author’s argument. We obviously can
owe duties to people we do not know.
Yes, of course we can
. So what is the difference between people who do not yet exist (future generations)
and people we do not know? Well, thought Isabel, one set of people exists and the
other does not. So, the author continued, the essence of the problem is whether one
can harm the non-existent.
Or is it?
Isabel asked herself. Surely the non-existence of the victim at the time of the harmful
act is not the real issue: the real issue is future harm to people
who will exist
.

Eating fish
, the author wrote,
is a good example
. We know that if we eat fish now, fish stocks will be depleted and there will not
be enough for the people who follow us. So does our current hunger—or current taste
for fish—justify using up fish stocks that would otherwise be enjoyed by people as
yet unborn?
Do we owe any fish to those who follow us?
the paper asked.

Do we owe any fish to those who follow us?
The sentence struck Isabel as vaguely comic, as if it might have been lifted from
some music-hall song; it was redolent, perhaps, of “Yes, we have no bananas.”

She put the paper down and moved across the room to the open window. From where she
was standing, she could see her neighbour’s contract gardener digging in a flower-bed.
He was a hard-working man who had once told her that he looked after twenty gardens
and was thinking of taking on several more. He had been a coal miner before the mines
closed—digging, in one form or another, had been his life. And thinking of that
made Isabel wonder whether the work she did—thinking about responsibility to future
generations and such problems—could really be described as work. Work usually made
something happen in the world, and she was not sure whether she did that at all. There
was a physical product—several hundred copies of a journal once every three months—but
did that actually change anything?

She looked at her watch. She was due to relieve Jamie of Charlie duties in two hours’
time, but if she stopped work now she would have time to go to her niece Cat’s delicatessen
and buy something for lunch. Cat had a supplier who delivered freshly made onion tarts
in the morning, which people picked up during their lunch break or on their way home
from work. If she left now, she would be able to have her choice of the tarts, and
still have time to finish reading the responsibility-to-future-generations paper—and
make a decision too. It would be yes, of course; she already felt that.

She closed her study windows, collected her shopping bag from the kitchen cupboard
and let herself out of the house. It was even warmer outside than indoors, though
tucked inside the shopping bag was her light jacket; the weather in Edinburgh was
notoriously fickle, and even a day like this could suddenly turn hostile. There would
be room for the onion tart too, and for some salad things—the bag was copious.

She made her way into Bruntsfield. Halfway along the road, she saw a large
For Sale
notice on the railings of one of the houses. She stopped and looked up at the windows
of the property. It was a large Victorian house that had been divided into flats,
and it was one of these that was now on the market. She paused; she had been expecting
its sale, as the owner, a quiet man whom people rarely saw, had died six months before.
He
had lived by himself, and it was thought that he had met somebody one evening who
had stabbed him to death in his own hallway.

Isabel stared up at the windows. Places where unhappy events have taken place are
no different from anywhere else. The physical world—the world of stone and brick—is
indifferent to our suffering, to our dramas, she thought. Even a battlefield can be
peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to play; the memories,
the sadness, are within us, not part of the world about us. And yet this house, as
she gazed at it, seemed bereft, seemed tragic and loveless, a reminder of the dark
thing that had happened there.

“Isabel?”

She gave a start.

“Sorry to give you a fright.”

She turned and saw Martha Drummond. In Isabel’s life, Martha was one of those people
who occupied that awkward territory between acquaintanceship and friendship; she saw
her relatively infrequently, and they were not on dropping-in terms. If she had been
pressed, Isabel would probably have confessed that she found Martha slightly irritating,
and felt bad about this feeling. It was hard to put her finger on it: Martha meant
well—whatever that meant—but had the habit of making intrusive remarks. There were
some people, in Isabel’s view, who lacked social judgement, not picking up quite the
same social cues as others did. “They don’t quite get it” expressed the notion exactly.
They didn’t.

Martha lived several streets away, in a house surrounded by a large rhododendron-filled
garden. And the rhododendrons were a case in point: a few months ago, when Isabel
had bumped into Martha in the supermarket, there had been an exchange
that had left Isabel thinking distinctly uncharitable thoughts. Martha had let drop
the fact that she had recently walked past Isabel’s garden and noticed her rhododendrons.
“They don’t seem to be doing all that well,” she said casually. “My own rhododendrons
are much more—how shall I put it?—luxuriant.”

Isabel had stared at her mutely. “There’s nothing wrong with my rhododendrons,” she
had eventually said. It was extremely tactless, she thought, to criticise another
person’s rhododendrons and, anyway, such criticism in this context was objectively
wrong.

“They don’t look very healthy to me,” Martha persisted. “Perhaps you’ve got the wrong
sort of soil.”

Isabel smarted. That was another serious accusation: to suggest to somebody that they
have the wrong sort of soil.

“There’s nothing wrong with my soil,” she said coolly. “Or with my rhododendrons,
for that matter.”

It had been a ridiculous exchange, but it was typical of the direction in which a
conversation with Martha could go. And it was for that reason that Isabel found it
difficult to consider Martha as a friend, although she knew that friendship did not
depend on seeing eye-to-eye.

Martha, who was in her early forties and divorced, shared her rhododendron-surrounded
house with her elderly mother, who, in her heyday, had been one of Scotland’s best-known
artists. Isabel liked her work, and had one of her smaller paintings in a corner of
her study.

“Not the best of Mother’s works,” Martha had said when Isabel had shown it to her.
“In fact, barely recognisable as one of her works at all.”

That had led to another pointless exchange. “Others might not agree with you,” Isabel
suggested through clenched teeth.

“But others are not the painter’s own daughter,” retorted Martha. “I imagine that
people don’t dismiss too readily the opinions of Paloma Picasso.”

Isabel had quickly planned her reply to that. A painter’s family, she would suggest,
were probably the last people to be asked for a judgement on their relative’s work—they
were simply too close to it, too emotionally involved to be able to give an objective
view. But she stopped herself, mainly because it would not be true. Members of the
family were often the best of judges, just as her friend, Guy Peploe—to think of only
one example—was the best judge of the paintings of his grandfather, S. J. Peploe.
So she had said nothing.