The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith

to interfere, and she must stop herself from drifting into a confrontation with Cat. This would make it more awkward in the future. Besides, he would go off with somebody else before too long and that would be that. Unless—and here was another appalling thought—unless Toby was interested in Cat for her money.
    Isabel tended not to think a great deal about money, a position of privilege, as she well recognised. She and her brother had each inherited from their mother a half share in the Louisiana and Gulf Land Company, and this had left them wealthy by any standards. Isabel was discreet about this, and used her money carefully in respect of herself and generously in respect of others. But the good that she did was done by stealth.
    On Cat’s twenty-first birthday Isabel’s brother had transferred enough to his daughter to allow her to buy a flat and, later, the delicatessen. There was not much left over from that—a wise policy on his part, thought Isabel—but Cat was extremely well off by the standards of her age group, most of whom would be struggling to save the deposit on a flat. Edinburgh was expensive, and thus was out of reach for many.
    Toby, of course, came from a well-off background, but his family’s money was probably tied up in the business and he was likely not paid much of a salary by his father. Such young men knew exactly how important money was, and they had a talent for sniffing it out. That meant that he might be very interested in the assets which Cat had at her disposal, although Isabel could never make such a suggestion openly. If only she could find some evidence of it, and prove it, as in the denouement of some dreadful drawing-room melodrama, but that would be highly unlikely.
    She reached across to reassure Cat as she changed the subject.
    “He’s perfectly all right,” she said. “I’ll make an effort, and I’m sure that I’ll see his good points. It’s my fault for being too … too fixed in my views. I’m sorry.”
    Cat appeared mollified, and Isabel steered the conversation to an account of her meeting with Paul Hogg. She had decided,on her way to the bistro, what she would do about that, and now she explained it to Cat.
    “I’ve tried to forget what I saw,” she explained. “It hasn’t worked. I still think about it, and then that conversation I had with Paul Hogg last night really disturbed me. Something odd happened that night at the Usher Hall. I don’t think that it was an accident. I really don’t.”
    Cat looked at her dubiously. “I hope you aren’t going to get involved,” she said. “You’ve done this before. You’ve got involved in things that are really none of your business. I really don’t think you should do that again.”
    Cat was aware of the fact that there was no point in upbraiding Isabel: she would never change. There was no reason why she should become involved in the affairs of others, but she seemed to be irresistibly drawn into them. And every time that she did it, it was because she imagined that there was a moral claim on her. This view of the world, with a seemingly endless supply of potential claims, meant that anybody with a problem could arrive on Isabel’s doorstep and be taken up, simply because the requirement of moral proximity—or her understanding of moral proximity—had been satisfied.
    They had argued about Isabel’s inability to say no, which in Cat’s view was the root of the problem. “You simply can’t get drawn into other people’s business like this,” she had protested after Isabel had become involved in sorting out the problems of a hotel-owning family that was fighting over what to do with their business. But Isabel, who had regularly been taken for Sunday lunch in the hotel as a child, had considered that this gave her an interest in what happened to it and had become sucked into an unpleasant boardroom battle.
    Cat had voiced the same concerns when it came to the unfortunateyoung man in the Usher Hall.