The Sunday Philosophy Club Read Free Page A

Nothing.”
    Isabel rose to her feet and went over to the percolator of freshly made coffee on the stove.
    “This will help,” she said, pouring Grace a cup. Then, as Grace took a sip, she pointed to the newspaper on the table.
    “There’s a terrible thing in
The Scotsman,”
she said. “An accident. I saw it last night at the Usher Hall. A young man fell all the way from the gods.”
    Grace gasped. “Poor soul,” she said. “And …”
    “He died,” said Isabel. “They took him to the Infirmary, but he was declared dead when he arrived.”
    Grace looked at her employer over her cup. “Did he jump?” she asked.
    Isabel shook her head. “Nobody has any reason to believe that.” She stopped. She had not thought of it at all. People did not kill themselves that way; if you wanted to jump, then you went to the Forth Bridge, or the Dean Bridge if you preferred the ground to the water. The Dean Bridge: Ruthven Todd had written a poem about that, had he not, and had said that its iron spikes “curiously repel the suicides”; curiously, because the thought of minor pain should surely mean nothing in the face of complete destruction. Ruthven Todd, she thought, all but ignored in spite of his remarkable poetry; one line of his, she had once said, was worth fifty lines of McDiarmid, with all his posturing; but nobody remembered Ruthven Todd anymore.
    She had seen McDiarmid once, when she was a schoolgirl, and had been walking with her father down Hanover Street, past Milnes Bar. The poet had come out of the bar in the company of a tall, distinguished-looking man, who had greeted her father. Her father had introduced her to both of them, and the tall man had shaken her hand courteously; McDiarmid had smiled, and nodded, and she had been struck by his eyes, which seemed to emit a piercing blue light. He was wearing a kilt, and carrying a small, battered leather briefcase, which he hugged to his chest, as if using it to protect himself against the cold.
    Afterwards her father had said: “The best poet and the wordiest poet in Scotland, both together.”
    “Which was which?” she had asked. They read Burns at school, and some Ramsay and Henryson, but nothing modern.
    “McDiarmid, or Christopher Grieve, to give him his real name, is the wordiest. The best is the tall man, Norman McCaig. But he’ll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one’s soul.” He had paused, and then asked: “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
    And Isabel had said, “No.”
    GRACE ASKED HER AGAIN: “Do you think he jumped?”
    “We did not see him actually fall over the edge,” Isabel said, folding the newspaper in such a way as to reveal the crossword. “We saw him on the way down—after he had slipped or whatever. I told the police that. They took a statement from me last night.”
    “People don’t slip that easily,” muttered Grace.
    “Yes, they do,” said Isabel. “They slip. All the time. I once read about somebody slipping on his honeymoon. The couple was visiting some falls in South America and the man slipped.”
    Grace raised an eyebrow. “There was a woman who fell over the crags,” she said. “Right here in Edinburgh. She was on her honeymoon.”
    “Well, there you are,” said Isabel. “Slipped.”
    “Except some thought she was pushed,” countered Grace. “The husband had taken out an insurance policy on her life a few weeks before. He claimed the money, and the insurance company refused to pay out.”
    “Well, it must happen in some cases. Some people are pushed. Others slip.” She paused, imagining the young couple in South America, with the spray from the falls shooting up and the man tumbling into the white, and the young bride running backalong the path, and the emptiness. You loved another, and this made you so vulnerable; just an inch or so too close to the edge and your world could change.
    She picked up her