Read Online The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith - Free Book Online

Glasgow to lead it there?
    Paul thought not. He knew several people, it transpired, who led secret lives, and they seemed to do it successfully.
    “But how do you know about their secret lives?” asked Isabel. “Did they tell you themselves?”
    Paul thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “If they told me, then they would hardly be secret.”
    “So you found out?” said Isabel. “Rather proves my point.”
    He had to admit that it did, and they laughed. “Mind you,” he said, “I can’t imagine what I would do in a secret life, if I had one to lead. What is there to do that people really disapprove of these days? Nobody seems to blink an eyelid over affairs. And convicted murderers write books.”
    “Indeed they do,” said Isabel. “But are these books really any good? Do they really say anything to us? Only the very immature and the very stupid are impressed by the depraved.” She wassilent for a moment. Then: “I suppose there must be something that people are ashamed of and are prepared to do in secret.”
    “Boys,” said Paul. “I know somebody who goes for boys. Nothing actually illegal. Seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds. But really just boys still.”
    Isabel looked at the painting, at the flowers and the cats. It was a long way from the world of Elizabeth Blackadder.
    “Boys,” she said. “I suppose some people find boys … how shall I put it? Interesting. One might want to be secretive about that. Not that Catullus was. He wrote poems about that sort of thing. He seemed not in the slightest bit embarrassed. Boys are a recognised genre in classical literature, aren’t they?”
    “This person I know goes off to Calton Hill, I think,” said Paul. “He drives up there in an empty car and drives down again with a boy. In secret, of course.”
    Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Oh well. People do these things.” There were things happening on one side of Edinburgh the other did not know a great deal about. Of course, Edinburgh, it was said, was built on hypocrisy. It was the city of Hume, of course, the home of the Scottish Enlightenment, but then what had happened? Petty Calvinism had flourished in the nineteenth century and the light had gone elsewhere; back to Paris, to Berlin, or off to America, to Harvard and the like, where everything was now possible. And Edinburgh had become synonymous with respectability, and with doing things in the way in which they had always been done. Respectability was such an effort, though, and there were bars and clubs where people might go and behave as they really wanted to behave, but did not dare do so publicly. The story of Jekyll and Hyde was conceived in Edinburgh, of course, and made perfect sense there.
    “Mind you,” Paul went on, “I have no secret life myself. I’mterribly conventional. I’m actually a fund manager. Not very exciting. And my fiancée works in Charlotte Square. So we’re not really … how might one put it?”
    “Bohemian?” said Isabel, laughing.
    “That’s right,” he said. “We’re more …”
    “Elizabeth Blackadder? Flowers and cats?”
    They continued their conversation. After fifteen minutes or so, Paul put his glass down on a windowsill.
    “Why don’t we go to the Vincent Bar?” he said. “I have to meet Minty at nine, and I can’t be bothered to go back to the flat. We could have a drink and carry on talking. That’s if you’d like to. You may have other things to do.”
    Isabel was happy to accept. The gallery had filled up and was beginning to get hot. The level of conversation had risen, too, and people were shouting to be heard. If she stayed she would have a sore throat. She collected her coat, said good-bye to the gallery owners, and walked out with Paul to the small, unspoilt bar at the end of the road.
    The Vincent Bar was virtually empty and they chose a table near the front door, for the fresh air.
    “I hardly ever go to a pub,” said Paul. “And yet I enjoy places like this.”
    “I can’t