The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) Read Online Free PDF Page B

later to see Eddie standing in front of her holding
     a replacement cup of coffee.
    “I assumed you wanted a refill,” he said. He spoke normally now, the attempt to affect
     an American accent being abandoned.
    Isabel smiled at him and took the proffered cup. Eddie hesitated, glancing around
     the shop to see if there was anybody needing attention. But, seeing that there was
     nobody waiting to be served, he sat down on the chair recently vacated by Martha.
     “That woman you were with looks familiar. Who is she?” he asked, nodding his head
     in the direction of the door.
    “She’s called Martha Drummond.”
    Eddie made a face. “I didn’t like her. Sorry, I know she’s your friend, but she behaved
     like a real cow just now.”
    “That’s possibly a bit unfair,” Isabel said. “She’s not all that bad.”
    “I can tell you don’t think that,” said Eddie. “Your eyes looked different when you
     said it.”
    I’m a bad liar, thought Isabel. That was twice in the last fewminutes that she had been accused of insincerity. “All right,” she confessed. “I’ll
     admit it: she gets on my nerves a bit. A lot, sometimes. I feel guilty about my attitude
     towards her. I’m not proud of it. But you know how it is? We all have people in our
     lives we don’t really choose as friends but with whom we’re, well, lumbered, I suppose.
     Heart-sink friends. Have you heard that expression?”
    Eddie had, and yes, he knew a few people like that. There had been a boy in his year
     at school, he said, who smelled of fish but who always wanted to sit next to him in
     class. “He had this condition, you see. It wasn’t that he didn’t wash—he did—it’s
     just that he smelled of fish. It was a medical condition, see.”
    Isabel said she had heard of it.
    “One of the teachers told us about it,” Eddie went on. “Apparently people who have
     it can’t break down some sort of chemical and that’s what makes them smell. It’s not
     their fault.”
    He looked at Isabel as if to challenge her to refute the proposition that smell has
     nothing to do with fault. And that was right, she thought, though only in respect
     of smells we could not help; those we could help were our responsibility; soap was
     readily available, and water too. A paper in the
Review
, perhaps? Responsibility for the body? Do we have a moral obligation to look—and
     smell—as good as we can manage? In one view, this could be a Kantian duty to the self,
     but in another it could be part of our duty not to offend those around us—one of those
     items of good social manners that strayed into the scope of morality proper. Of course,
     that had all sorts of ramifications. What about wearing clothes that offended other
     people—clothes that revealed bad colour coordination, for example? Was that wrong?
     Surely not, although wearing scanty clothing in sensitive settings was another matter.
     When important women went to see thePope, they dressed conservatively out of respect for … for what? Now it became even
     more complicated: the following of a dress code that treated women as potential temptresses
     revealed an acceptance of a whole attitude towards women that some did not condone.
     So had the Pope any
right
, Isabel wondered, to expect women to dress in a particular way when they called on
     him? That raised the question of whether the hosts could dictate the dress of their
     guests—and they could, Isabel considered, because people were always telling their
     invitees what to wear:
black tie, casual-smart
and all the rest of the signals were everyday examples of precisely that. So the
     Pope had the right, if he wished, to expect a certain sort of dress on the part of
     his visitors. And so did everybody else, it seemed. She smiled; that sorted
that
out.
    Eddie could tell that Isabel’s mind was elsewhere. It was chronic, he thought. She’s
     always thinking about all sorts of really
stupid
things. He continued, “The teacher