CHAPTER FIVE

THAT EVENING, on impulse, Isabel said to Jamie, “Look, it’s five o’clock, or just about. If we bathed Charlie now and gave him his—”

“Tea,” supplied Jamie, pointedly, but smiling as he said it. He wanted to use the popular Scottish word for what Isabel would have called dinner, or possibly supper.

“If you like,” said Isabel. “I was going to say dinner, as you well know. But then, if you’re going to be all down and demotic, dinner means lunch in such circles, doesn’t it?”

“Feed,” suggested Jamie. “How about that as a compromise?”

Isabel did not think so. “Give him his feed? It sounds like agriculture to me. You give feed to cattle, don’t you. Anyway, after he’s had his…”

“Grub.”

“All right, after he’s had his grub, why don’t we…” She paused. “Grub first, then ethics. You know who said that?” It was an accurate description, perhaps, of the daily routine of the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, which did indeed begin with breakfast and proceed to ethics.

Jamie did not hesitate. “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. Brecht.”

Isabel bowed her head in mock homage. “I’m impressed.”

“My German teacher at school went on about that,” said Jamie. “He said that Fressen was appropriate for animals rather than people. Brecht was showing his low opinion of humanity by choosing to say Fressen rather than Essen. That’s why grub is a better translation than food. Grub is messy, animal stuff. He was very clever.”

“He was a hypocrite,” said Isabel. “He lived very comfortably in the GDR. No belching Trabbi for him. And he supported those horrific people who ran the place.”

Jamie shrugged. “He believed in communism, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “But he enjoyed what other writers in the GDR were denied. Freedom.” It was tawdry, that shabby republic, with its legions of informers and its unremitting greyness, its rotten, crumbling concrete. And then it had all gone so quickly, as in a puff of smoke; the whole Soviet empire, with its deadening tentacles of fear, collapsed and discredited, vanished like a confidence trickster who has been exposed. And yet there had been so many who had connived in it, had derided its opponents; what had they to say now? Her thoughts turned to Professor Lettuce, who had been a founder of something called the East-West Philosophical Engagement Committee. He had gone to East Berlin, as had Dove, and had publicly complained about reactionaries, as he described them, who had questioned the visit on the grounds that meetings would be restricted to those with posts in the universities, Party men every one of them. Dove…She thought of his paper on the Trolley Problem; she felt a vague unease about that, and she felt that there would be more to come.

But Brecht and the GDR, and even Dove and Lettuce, seemed far away. “Let’s leave Brecht out of it for a moment,” she said. “After Charlie has been fed, I thought we could go out to the Pentlands and just…just go for a walk. Up past the reservoir. Charlie could go in the sling. He’s getting a bit heavy for that, but you can carry him. He’ll probably just nod straight off. It’s such a lovely evening.” And I want to talk to you, she thought. I want to be with you.

         

THEY DROVE OUT onto the Biggar Road, leaving the last of the town behind them. Isabel was at the wheel of her green Swedish car and Jamie sat in the back, to keep Charlie company in his car seat. At Flotterstone, a few miles round the back of the Pentland Hills, they turned off the main road and parked in the small car park set aside for hikers. Then, Charlie safely installed in the sling affixed to Jamie, they set off up the winding road into the hills. Jamie gave Charlie a finger, and the child gripped it tightly. “Look,” said Jamie, nodding in the direction of the little fist around his index finger. “Look.”

Isabel smiled at the sight. She had watched the process of Jamie’s falling in love with Charlie, watched every step, from the first surprise and discovery to this emblematic moment, each act of tenderness by Jamie confirming the diagnosis of deepening love. Nothing had been said, and she thought that it was right that this should be so; the declaration of love could weaken its mystery, reduce it to the mundane. To say on the telephone, Love you, as she heard people doing, was dangerous, or so Isabel thought, because it made the extraordinary ordinary, and possibly meaningless. Good day meant nothing now because it had become an empty formula; love you could go the same way. It was significant that it had already been shortened, and the I had been dropped. What did that mean? That people were too busy to say I love you, or too embarrassed by the subjectivity of the full expression?

They began their walk, following the narrow road that worked its way up between the fold of the hills. The road, which was not used by ordinary traffic, was bordered on either side by an undulating stone dyke. To their left, all the way down to the bed of a small river, the throaty gurgling of whose waters could just be heard, was a slope on which Scots pines grew, their branches host to crows, which cawed and flew away. On the other side of the road, beyond the lichen-covered stones of the dyke, fields swept up the hillside; fields interrupted here and there by clumps of gorse, in flower at this time of year, the dark green foliage spiked with small clusters of yellow. Blackface sheep, hardy enough for the Scottish hills, dotted the fields, paused in their grazing and stared vacantly at Isabel and Jamie as they walked past, then dropped their heads again, unconcerned, and moved away.

“Charlie’s asleep,” whispered Jamie. “Off like a top.”

She peeked at him. “It must be the most wonderful feeling, being carried like this. Warm and secure. Why would one want to grow up?”

Jamie laughed. “Why indeed?”

They walked on. They were now drawing level with the reservoir, which covered the flooded floor of the glen. The road they were following traced a route round the side of it before making its way up to the head of the glen, to peter out at the just-visible buildings of an isolated sheep farm. The surface of the loch was still, as there was no wind, no breeze, and the sky ahead, high and empty, was reflected on the water; no clouds, just blue. She turned to Jamie and took his hand, easily, unself-consciously. The touch of him thrilled her, and she shivered.

“I met Stella Moncrieff for coffee this morning,” she said. “Remember, I said I was going to do that.”

He was looking up, trying to make out something halfway up the hill. “And?”

“Well, she wanted to see me. She’s asked me to help her with something.”

As Isabel expected, this caught Jamie’s attention. He turned to her. “Isabel…” There was an unmistakable note of warning in his voice. Jamie did not approve of Isabel’s getting involved in matters that did not concern her and had told her as much, on numerous occasions.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” And then, after a few moments, “I could hardly refuse.”

Jamie shook his head. “But that’s exactly what you could do,” he said. “Life consists of refusing things we shouldn’t be doing.”

Isabel reflected on this for a moment. Perhaps for some people life did indeed consist of refusing to do things—there were those who were adept at that. But she was not one of them. Her problem, rather, was one of deciding which claims on her moral attention to respond to and which to ignore; and it seemed, for some reason, that there were always more of the former than the latter. How can we ignore a cry for help? she asked herself. By steeling our hearts? By closing them?

She stopped and turned to Jamie, placing a hand on his forearm. Behind him, above the hill, a bird of prey circled watchfully; the evening sun, still with a touch of summer warmth in it, touched the heather with gold. At this time of year in Scotland it would be light until eleven at night; farther north, in the Shetlands, it would never get dark at all; at midnight the simmer din would make it possible to read a newspaper outside without strain to the eyes.

“Don’t you want to know what she asked me to do?” He could hardly say no, she thought.

He sighed. “All right.” They began to walk again, and he added, “But I don’t approve. You know that, don’t you?”

She held his arm lightly, and began to tell him about her conversation with Stella. Marcus, Stella’s husband, was a doctor.

“What sort?” asked Jamie. “Everybody’s a doctor in Edinburgh. Or a lawyer.”

“An infectious diseases specialist—a very highly regarded one, apparently. Or he used to be highly regarded.” She went on to explain what Stella had told her. Marcus, she said, had been at the forefront of work on MRSA, the so-called superbug, which had been the cause of a growing number of deaths in hospitals.

“Apparently quite a few people are carriers of this,” said Isabel. “You or I might quite innocently have it. In our noses, I’m sorry to say. Our systems keep it under control, but we can pass it on to others, who can’t cope with it.”

Jamie looked down at Charlie, at his tiny nose. “And?”

“And he was doing a trial on a new antibiotic,” Isabel continued. “One that can knock this MRSA on the head. A drug company has come up with a pretty good candidate and has been given a licence to produce it in this country. Marcus had been involved in the clinical trials and was monitoring its use in patients.

“Everything was going perfectly well, and then, very much to his surprise, a patient who had taken the drug developed pretty serious side effects. Heart palpitations, Stella said. And another one turned up with the same sort of thing. Alarm bells started to ring.”

If Jamie had been indifferent to the story at the beginning, he no longer was. “What was that drug that was so disastrous? The one that people used before they realised that it caused terrible birth defects?”

“Thalidomide. I suppose this was a bit different. The patients were all right, even if things were a bit scary for them. Anyway, Marcus was asked by the health authorities to look into these cases. He did that, and he also published a report in a medical journal in which he showed that both of these patients had been given a massive overdose of the drug: one was a drug addict and had self-administered it in the deluded belief that he would get some sort of hit from it; the other was the victim of a nursing error. So he claimed that everything was fine and that the drug was perfectly safe within the limits they set for this sort of thing.”

She sensed Jamie’s absorption in the story, and was pleased. “But,” Isabel went on, “there was an unpleasant surprise around the corner. A few weeks later he published his findings, in the form of a letter in one of the big medical journals—a few weeks after he had said everything was perfectly safe, a man up in Perthshire was given the drug and promptly died. There was an enquiry and the hospital authorities took a closer look at Marcus’s original report—the one that said that everything was perfectly all right. And what did they find?”

Jamie frowned. “That he’d made a mistake?”

“Yes. But more than that. The data in his original paper was shown to have been falsified. It was something to do with the level of the dosage.”

They walked on. Jamie was lost in thought; then he spoke. “I see where this is going. The implication was that he had an interest in keeping the drug manufacturers happy and that he falsified the figures for their sake. For money.”

That was not what Stella had suggested, Isabel explained. She had said that although the press had had a field day and blamed Marcus for the death, they had not accused him of doing it for money. But he had been reported to the General Medical Council and he had been heavily censured for issuing a misleading report. He resigned from his university chair, too, and stopped all medical work.

“A rather sad story,” said Jamie. “Sad for everybody.” He paused. “And she wants you to…” He looked at Isabel. “She wants you to clear her husband’s name? Is that it?”

Isabel nodded.

“Oh, Isabel!” exploded Jamie. “What’s this got to do with you? What’s this got to do with being the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, for heaven’s sake?”

“Everything,” said Isabel.

Jamie looked puzzled. “I’m sorry…”

“She says that he’s completely innocent. That’s what it’s got to do with me. An innocent man is now consumed with shame for something he didn’t do. That has something to do with all of us, I would have thought. And it just so happens that I have been asked by his wife to do something about it. That brings me into a relationship of—”

“Moral proximity with him,” said Jamie. “Yes, I know all about that. You’ve told me about moral proximity.”

“Well, then,” said Isabel. “There you have it.”

“But how can you believe her—just like that?”

“She seemed to me to be telling the truth.”

“But what wife wouldn’t? Of course spouses protest that their spouses are innocent. Mothers do it too. Presumably Mrs. Stalin took the view that her son Joe was widely misjudged. That he would never have run a terror.”

Isabel laughed. “One cannot expect objectivity from a spouse, I suppose. But then I have somebody else’s view to go on as well. That cardiologist I sat next to at the dinner told me that he was convinced that Marcus was innocent. He didn’t tell me at the time what it was that he was supposed to have done, but he did tell me that he thought he didn’t do it. That’s two views in favour of innocence.”

They had reached the end of the reservoir, and Jamie now glanced at his watch. “We should go back now,” he said. “We’ll need to settle him.” He planted a kiss on the top of Charlie’s head, on the tiny tam-o’-shanter he was wearing. Then, when they had started to retrace their steps, he said to Isabel, “I’m sorry I sounded so discouraging. You want to do this, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I do.”

“Then I’m proud of you,” said Jamie. “Really proud.”

And with that he leaned over towards her and kissed her. She touched his hair. She breathed in. I am so in love, she thought, so deeply in love; and love of one is love of another, and another, until all humanity is embraced and the heavenly city realised, which will never happen, not even in your lifetime, Charlie, she thought.

         

WITH CHARLIE PUT TO BED, Jamie said, “I’ll cook.”

It was now almost nine in the evening and Isabel had not thought much about supper. She had a vague idea that they might have a plate of the moussaka that she had made the previous day and needed to be finished off, but she had done nothing about it and Jamie’s offer was particularly welcome. He would make pasta, he said; he had discovered some porcini mushrooms in the larder and some cream. “Not very adventurous,” he said.

“Delicious,” said Isabel. “And thank you. I want to look at some things in my study.”

She left him in the kitchen and went through to her study in the front of the house. She had a fax machine there, and there was often a small pile of papers disgorged at the end of the day, waiting for her attention: scribbled notes from the printers, queries from the copy editor, and, in this case, a report from a reader. That was what she had hoped for, and she caught her breath when she saw it.

She had sent Dove’s paper on the Trolley Problem to two referees, as was normal with any unsolicited paper. She had been scrupulously careful in her choice of referees; it would have been easy to pick a harsh one—and she knew at least one professor of philosophy, himself a seldom published man, who delighted in finding fault with the work of others and recommending against publication. Isabel would not use him as a referee, although when Professor Lettuce had been in charge of the board he had taken to doing so off his own bat. This man, whom Isabel had nicknamed the Harsh Critic, was friendly with Lettuce. Two peas from the same pod, thought Isabel; Lettuce seemed to attract vegetable metaphors, she admitted—the great turnip. No, she would not send it to the Harsh Critic because he would reject it more or less automatically—or would he? If he, the Harsh Critic, was friendly with Lettuce, then might it not be possible that he would be on good terms with Lettuce’s acolyte, Dove, the oleaginous one? In which case he would probably recommend in favour of publication, as he would not like to cause Lettuce to wilt. This made matters more complex. If she decided against the Harsh Critic, then she was taking away from Dove a chance that he would otherwise have, and she wanted to treat him with scrupulous fairness. But no, he would get a random referee, one chosen by her when she opened her address book at random…like this, and there he was, the obvious choice, her friend Iain Torrance. Iain, a theologian with a philosophical background, was as fair-minded a man as one could meet, and, what was more, he had a reputation for working quickly, as he had done now. For she saw lying there, having slid down from the desk on which the fax machine was placed, his faxed report—a neatly typed page of paper subscribed at the bottom with his signature: Iain.

She reached down to pick it up. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking. She perched on the arm of one of her library chairs; the seat itself was stacked with papers, the chair having long since ceased to be anything but part of her filing system. There were three paragraphs; two lengthy ones and a final, short one. She skimmed through the first two and then came to the third. It could not have been clearer.

“I much regret,” wrote Iain, “that I find no original insights in this paper. The arguments advanced by previous participants in the discussion are repeated, but not developed. And that part of the paper which purports to be a further refinement of the original conditions of the bystander’s plight do not add anything. Try as I might, I cannot think of any respect in which this paper helps a problem which already has a certain hoariness to it. Paper and ink are finite. I cannot recommend they be squandered on this article.”

She put down the report and closed her eyes briefly, as if to order her thoughts. Then she left her study and went back into the kitchen. The pasta was simmering on the stove, misting up the windows, but there was no sign of Jamie. Then she heard the piano, and smiled. They sometimes sang together, or he sang for her; now she heard him.

He stopped as she came into the morning room. He laid his hands gently on the keyboard, at rest, and smiled at her. She wanted to run to him, to hug him to her, this young man who had come to her so unexpectedly, who brought music, a child, beauty—all these things into her life. But she contained herself, and asked, “What was that again? It was so haunting.” It was.

“ ‘The Parting Glass,’ ” he said. “It’s one of those songs that has a complicated history. There are Irish versions and Scottish versions. Burns joined in and did a version too.”

“Of course. I’ve heard it before. Could I hear it again?”

“Here,” he said. “Take this glass of wine. And hold it. That’s how you should listen to it. Take a sip.”

She took the glass of white wine from him. It was still chilled, with tiny drops on the outside. She moved it in her hand, feeling the cool of it, the wetness.

Jamie said, “This song makes me feel sad.”

She watched him.

He began to sing, and the words, which he enunciated so carefully, and the slow movement of the melody, touched at her heart:

Oh, all the comrades that ere I had

Are sorry for my going away

And all the sweethearts that ere I had

Would wish me one more day to stay

But since it falls unto my lot

That I should rise and you should not

I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call

Good night and joy be with you all.

He finished and gently closed the lid of the piano.

She did not move. “Why did you sing that?” she asked.

Jamie looked up. “Sometimes I just feel that way,” he said. “I feel sad when I’m happy. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

She thought of the words: But since it falls unto my lot / That I should rise and you should not—words of leave-taking, every bit as moving as those used by Burns in “Auld Lang Syne,” and with perhaps an even greater poignancy to them. Why, she wondered, did we need loss and parting to remind us of how much friendship, and indeed love, meant to us? Yet we did.