The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

could assume an almost sacramental nature. Any one of us might do something simple, like tying a shoelace or combing our hair, or, as now, putting potatoes on a plate, and our acts would seem unexceptional. But when Jamie, or somebody like him, did such things, the act became something more than its mundane essentials. Artists sensed this, she thought, and captured the significance. Through Vermeer’s eyes we could look for hours at a young woman reading a letter. We knew that it was simply a young girl reading a letter—but it was more than that, far more.
    Jamie sat down, and they ate in a silence that was punctuated only with desultory exchanges. Halfway through the meal, she reached out and touched him on the arm. He paused, and looked at her, and briefly closed his eyes. She touched him again, lightly, and they resumed their meal.
    He spoke with lowered eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m just not myself.”
    “I understand.” She did. She imagined, too, how he felt; there would be the rawness that came with the hearing of bad news, the feeling of hopelessness that comes from the knowledgethat we all must die, and some sooner than others. The only time this did not hurt was when we still had about us the immortality of youth, and Jamie would be far beyond that now.
    She told him at the end of the meal that he should not bother to help with the clearing of the table and the stacking of the dishes.
    He offered. “No, I will.”
    “No. Go and play the piano. Leave the door open. I’ll listen.”
    He did not insist, and left the room. She heard him open the door of the living room and a few moments later there came the sound of the first notes. Schubert.
    Jamie played for half an hour or so. Isabel finished in the kitchen and went into her study, where she picked up an article she had been reading earlier and had abandoned. It was tough going, and she knew that she could not accept it for the
Review
. Yet there was something dogged about the author’s argument, and in spite of herself she found herself reading it to the end. There the author concluded: “Ultimately we act for the good because we see it to be there—like the sun. We cannot judge the sun, and there is no point in trying to do that. The sun is there. We are here. We cannot either explain or deny these facts.”
    She set the paper aside. She was not convinced. The suggestion that we acted for the good because it was there was no answer, except, perhaps, in an intuitive system of ethics. How did we know that what we thought of as the good was, in fact, good? That was the job of the moral philosopher, and it did not help merely to say that the good was there, like the sun. She felt her irritation growing, but then, quite suddenly, she thought: Unless … unless the good was indeed something like the sun, something that we
felt
, just as we feel the sun upon our skin.Goodness would be a glow, a source of energy, a radiating force that we might never understand but which was still there. Gravity was there, and we felt it, but did anybody, other than theoretical physicists, actually understand it? What if goodness were the same sort of force: something that was there, could not be seen or tasted, but was still capable of drawing us into its orbit?
    She felt almost dizzy at the thought. Perhaps there was a force of moral goodness, every bit as powerful, in its way, as any of the physical forces that kept electrons in circulation about the nucleus of an atom. Perhaps we understood that, even if we acted against it, even if we denied it. And that force could be called anything, God being one name that people gave to it. And we knew that it was there because we felt its presence, as the religious believer may be convinced in his very bones of the presence of God, even if we could not describe the nature of it.
    Or was it just a brain state—something within us rather than outside us, a trick of biochemistry? The feeling of recognition experienced on encountering this