The Lost Art of Gratitude_ An Isabel Dalhousie Novel - Alexander McCall Smith [59]
“Yes, it is rather nice, isn’t it? I like the view. Have you looked at it?”
Lettuce twisted round in his seat and looked out over Chambers Street. “Roofs,” he said.
Isabel did not know what to say to that. She handed him the menu and he adjusted his glasses to read. “My stomach is not what it was,” he said. “I find that I take very little at lunch.”
She thought of the word he used: take. Most people ate; one had to be terribly grand to take.
“It’s best not to overeat,” she said. She might have said overtake, she mused, but that would have made a very odd statement, more about driving than eating.
“You’re smiling.”
Lettuce was staring at her. She noticed his slightly prissy expression, one that some large men have; an expression of fastidiousness that for some reason seems at odds with their size.
“A passing thought,” she said. “I have a tendency to think about wordplay. Don’t you find yourself drifting off from time to time—some odd little notion?”
He wrinkled his nose. “No. I can’t say I find that at all.”
“Well, maybe it’s a thing that women do.”
Lettuce smiled. “It’s as well that you said that, not me. These days it seems impermissible for men to make general remarks about the minds of women. Not the other way round, of course. You women can say what you like about men.”
Isabel had to admit that this was true, although she did not like hearing it from Professor Lettuce. She had noticed that the constraints on such remarks seemed to apply only to men. Women could say, quite freely, that men could not multi-task, for instance, but men could not say that women could not reverse cars as well as males could. Or if they said that they would inevitably be accused of condescension, or sexism, or some other unforgivable -ism. It was contextual, she realised; it is not just what is said that is judged, it is what was said before. So what men say now is taken in the context of what they used to say—and what they used to do, too, which as often as not was to put women down and make jokes about how women reversed cars. Whereas the words of women, who rarely put men down—except in some Amazonian fantasy—were free of this contextual baggage. So the motives behind a man’s words were now evaluated in the light of what men used commonly to think. Yet that, surely, was as wrong as saying that a person with a criminal record is likely to have committed the offence with which he is now charged. There were rules of evidence that were designed to stop exactly that conclusion, in the name of simple justice. So Professor Lettuce was right about this; it was unfair, but she was not sure that she wanted to concede the point, to Lettuce at least.
“Well, you can, can’t you?” challenged Lettuce. “You can say what you like and we can’t. I can’t, for example, say that science has demonstrated real differences between the male and female brain, and this makes for differences in the way in which men and women respond to distress or view art. Or even for differences in the way they reverse cars.” He laughed at his last example; he laughed.
She realised that Lettuce was talking for men here—for the whole class of men. It was a major assumption. And did the generality of men, she wondered, want people like Lettuce to speak for them?
“Oh, I don’t know. I think that there’s a time after a period of unfair treatment—or even oppression—when the tables are turned, so to speak. The victims of past injustice are given a bit more leeway, I think.”
Lettuce’s lips were pursed in disapproval. “Two wrongs do not make a right, Miss Dalhousie. A simple adage, but applicable, would you not say, to many contemporary forms of social engineering?” He had always called her Miss Dalhousie, and the formality, it seemed to Isabel, was meant to exclude. She was not a colleague, in his eyes; she was not a man, with whom he would feel comfortable. It was as simple as that. And, of course, he resented her purchase of the Review and the restructuring