that the priest wouldn’t believe either.”
She paused. Jamie had picked up his table napkin and was folding it. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I’m sorry about all that. I shouldn’t have asked you, should I?”
“I don’t mind,” said Isabel. “But it does show how these big decisions are just drifted into in a rather messy way. And that we can be very wrong about everything. Don’t be wrong in your life, Jamie. Don’t get it all wrong.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
T HE MESSAGE WAS TAKEN by Grace the following morning, when Isabel was out in the garden. The address she was looking for was 48, Warrender Park Terrace, fourth floor right. The name on the door would be Duffus, which was the name of the girl who had shared with Mark Fraser. She was called Henrietta Duffus, but was known as Hen, and the man, the third of the original three flatmates, was Neil Macfarlane. That was all that Cat had managed to come up with, but it was all that she had asked Cat to find out.
Grace passed on the information to Isabel with a quizzical look, but Isabel decided not to tell her what it was about. Grace had firm views on inquisitiveness and was inevitably discreet in her dealings. She would undoubtedly have considered any enquiries which Isabel was planning to make to be quite unwarranted, and would have made a comment along those lines. So Isabel was silent.
She had decided to visit the flatmates that evening, as there would be no point in calling during the day, when they would be at work. For the rest of that day she worked on the review, reading several submissions which had arrived in that morning’s post.This was an important screening process. Like any journal, no matter how academic, the review received contributions that were completely unsuitable and which need not even be sent off to a specialist reader. That morning, though, had brought five serious articles, and these would have to be looked at carefully. She settled down at first to a carefully argued piece on rule utilitarianism in the legislative process, leaving the spicier “Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships: A Challenge to Kant” for later in the morning. That was one for after coffee, she thought; she liked to savour criticism of Kant.
The day passed quickly. The rule utilitarianism article was weighty, but largely unreadable, owing to the author’s style. It appeared to be written in English, but it was a variety of English which Isabel felt occurred only in certain corners of academia, where faux weightiness was a virtue. It was, she thought, as if the English had been translated from German; not that the verbs all migrated to the end, it was just that everything sounded so
heavy,
so utterly earnest.
It was tempting to exclude the unintelligible paper on the grounds of grammatical obfuscation, and then to write to the author—in simple terms—and explain to him why this was being done. But she had seen his name and his institution on the title page of the article, and she knew that there would be repercussions if she did this. Harvard!
“Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships” was more clearly written, but said nothing surprising. We should tell the truth, the author argued, but not the whole truth. There were occasions when hypocrisy was necessary in order to protect the feelings of others. (It was as if the author were echoing her own recently articulated thought on the subject.) So we should not tell our lovers that they are inadequate lovers—if that is what they are.Quite clearly only if that is what they are, thought Isabel. The limits to honesty in that department were particularly severe, and rightly so.
She read the article with some amusement, and thought that it would make a lively read for the review’s subscribers, who perhaps needed a bit of
encouragement.
The philosophy of sex was an unusual area of applied ethics, but it had its exponents, who met, she knew, at an annual conference in the United States. The review had
She paused. Jamie had picked up his table napkin and was folding it. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I’m sorry about all that. I shouldn’t have asked you, should I?”
“I don’t mind,” said Isabel. “But it does show how these big decisions are just drifted into in a rather messy way. And that we can be very wrong about everything. Don’t be wrong in your life, Jamie. Don’t get it all wrong.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
T HE MESSAGE WAS TAKEN by Grace the following morning, when Isabel was out in the garden. The address she was looking for was 48, Warrender Park Terrace, fourth floor right. The name on the door would be Duffus, which was the name of the girl who had shared with Mark Fraser. She was called Henrietta Duffus, but was known as Hen, and the man, the third of the original three flatmates, was Neil Macfarlane. That was all that Cat had managed to come up with, but it was all that she had asked Cat to find out.
Grace passed on the information to Isabel with a quizzical look, but Isabel decided not to tell her what it was about. Grace had firm views on inquisitiveness and was inevitably discreet in her dealings. She would undoubtedly have considered any enquiries which Isabel was planning to make to be quite unwarranted, and would have made a comment along those lines. So Isabel was silent.
She had decided to visit the flatmates that evening, as there would be no point in calling during the day, when they would be at work. For the rest of that day she worked on the review, reading several submissions which had arrived in that morning’s post.This was an important screening process. Like any journal, no matter how academic, the review received contributions that were completely unsuitable and which need not even be sent off to a specialist reader. That morning, though, had brought five serious articles, and these would have to be looked at carefully. She settled down at first to a carefully argued piece on rule utilitarianism in the legislative process, leaving the spicier “Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships: A Challenge to Kant” for later in the morning. That was one for after coffee, she thought; she liked to savour criticism of Kant.
The day passed quickly. The rule utilitarianism article was weighty, but largely unreadable, owing to the author’s style. It appeared to be written in English, but it was a variety of English which Isabel felt occurred only in certain corners of academia, where faux weightiness was a virtue. It was, she thought, as if the English had been translated from German; not that the verbs all migrated to the end, it was just that everything sounded so
heavy,
so utterly earnest.
It was tempting to exclude the unintelligible paper on the grounds of grammatical obfuscation, and then to write to the author—in simple terms—and explain to him why this was being done. But she had seen his name and his institution on the title page of the article, and she knew that there would be repercussions if she did this. Harvard!
“Truth Telling in Sexual Relationships” was more clearly written, but said nothing surprising. We should tell the truth, the author argued, but not the whole truth. There were occasions when hypocrisy was necessary in order to protect the feelings of others. (It was as if the author were echoing her own recently articulated thought on the subject.) So we should not tell our lovers that they are inadequate lovers—if that is what they are.Quite clearly only if that is what they are, thought Isabel. The limits to honesty in that department were particularly severe, and rightly so.
She read the article with some amusement, and thought that it would make a lively read for the review’s subscribers, who perhaps needed a bit of
encouragement.
The philosophy of sex was an unusual area of applied ethics, but it had its exponents, who met, she knew, at an annual conference in the United States. The review had
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