Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

B O O K S B Y A L E X A N D E R M c C A L L S M I T H

I N T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B S E R I E S

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

I N T H E N O . 1 L A D I E S ’ D E T E C T I V E A G E N C Y S E R I E S

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

I N T H E P O R T U G U E S E I R R E G U L A R V E R B S S E R I E S

Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa F R I E N D S, L O V E R S, C H O C O L A T E

E

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F R I E N D S, L O V E R S,

C H O C O L A T E

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h p a n t h e o n b o o k s

n e w y o r k

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A.

Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, London.

Exerpt from “Streams” by W. H. Auden reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of W. H. Auden.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCall Smith, Alexander, [date]

Friends, lovers, chocolate / Alexander McCall Smith.

p. cm.

eISBN 0-375-42392-3

1. Women editors—Fiction. 2. Heart—Transplantation—Patients—

Fiction. 3. Italians—Scotland—Fiction. 4. Edinburgh (Scotland)—

Fiction. 5. Delicatessens—Fiction. 6. Housekeepers—Fiction.

7. Nieces—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.C326F75 2005 823'.914—dc22

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For Angus and Fiona Foster

F R I E N D S, L O V E R S, C H O C O L A T E

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C H A P T E R O N E

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THE MAN in the brown Harris tweed overcoat—double-breasted with three small leather-covered buttons on the cuffs—

made his way slowly along the street that led down the spine of Edinburgh. He was aware of the seagulls which had drifted in from the shore and which were swooping down onto the cob-blestones, picking up fragments dropped by somebody who had been careless with a fish. Their mews were the loudest sound in the street at that moment, as there was little traffic and the city was unusually quiet. It was October, it was mid-morning, and there were few people about. A boy on the other side of the road, scruffy and tousle-haired, was leading a dog along with a makeshift leash—a length of string. The dog, a small Scottish terrier, seemed unwilling to follow the boy and glanced for a moment at the man as if imploring him to intervene to stop the tugging and the pulling. There must be a saint for such dogs, thought the man; a saint for such dogs in their small prisons.

The man reached the St. Mary’s Street crossroads. On the corner on his right was a pub, the World’s End, a place of resort for fiddlers and singers; on his left, Jeffrey Street curved round and dipped under the great arch of the North Bridge. Through 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the gap in the buildings, he could see the flags on top of the Bal-moral Hotel: the white-on-blue cross of the Saltire, the Scottish flag, the familiar diagonal stripes of the Union Jack. There was a stiff breeze from the north, from Fife, which made the flags stand out from their poles with pride, like the flags on the prow of a ship ploughing into the wind. And that, he thought, was what Scotland was like: a small vessel pointed out to sea, a small vessel buffeted by the wind.

He crossed the street and continued down the hill. He walked past a fishmonger, with its gilt fish sign suspended over the street, and the entrance to a close, one of those small stone passages that ran off the street underneath the tenements. And then he was where he wanted to be, outside the Canongate Kirk, the high-gabled church set just a few paces off the High Street. At the top of the gable, stark against the light blue of the sky, the arms of the kirk, a stag’s antlers, gilded, against the background of a similarly golden cross.

He entered the gate and looked up. One might be in Hol-land, he thought, with that gable; but there were too many reminders of Scotland—the wind, the sky, the grey stone. And there was what he had come to see, the stone which he visited every year on this day, this day when the poet had died at the age of twenty-four. He walked across the grass towards the stone, its shape reflecting the gable of the kirk, its lettering still clear after two hundred years. Robert Burns himself had paid for this stone to be erected, in homage to his brother in the muse, and had written the lines of its inscription: This simple stone directs Pale Scotia’s way/ To pour her sorrows o’er her poet’s dust.

He stood quite still. There were others who could be visited here. Adam Smith, whose days had been filled with thoughts of F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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markets and economics and who had coined an entire science, had his stone here, more impressive than this, more ornate; but this was the one that made one weep.

He reached into a pocket of his overcoat and took out a small black notebook of the sort that used to advertise itself as waterproof. Opening it, he read the lines that he had written out himself, copied from a collection of Robert Garioch’s poems.

He read aloud, but in a low voice, although there was nobody present save for him and the dead:

Canongait kirkyaird in the failing year Is auld and grey, the wee roseirs are bare, Five gulls leem white agin the dirty air.

Why are they here? There’s naething for them here Why are we here oursels?

Yes, he thought. Why am I here myself ? Because I admire this man, this Robert Fergusson, who wrote such beautiful words in the few years given him, and because at least somebody should remember and come here on this day each year.

And this, he told himself, was the last time that he would be able to do this. This was his final visit. If their predictions were correct, and unless something turned up, which he thought was unlikely, this was the last of his pilgrimages.

He looked down at his notebook again. He continued to read out loud. The chiselled Scots words were taken up by the wind and carried away:

Strang, present dool

Ruggs at my hairt. Lichtlie this gin ye daur: Here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Strong, present sorrow

Tugs at my heart. Treat this lightly if you dare: Here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the soil.

He took a step back. There was nobody there to observe the tears which had come to his eyes, but he wiped them away in embarrassment. Strang, present dool. Yes. And then he nodded towards the stone and turned round, and that was when the woman came running up the path. He saw her almost trip as the heel of a shoe caught in a crack between two paving stones, and he cried out. But she recovered herself and came on towards him, waving her hands.

“Ian. Ian.” She was breathless. And he knew immediately what news she had brought him, and he looked at her gravely.

She said, “Yes.” And then she smiled, and leant forward to embrace him.

“When?” he asked, stuffing the notebook back into his pocket.

“Right away,” she said. “Now. Right now. They’ll take you down there straightaway.”

They began to walk back along the path, away from the stone. He had been warned not to run, and could not, as he would rapidly become breathless. But he could walk quite fast on the flat, and they were soon back at the gate to the kirk, where the black taxi was waiting, ready to take them.

“Whatever happens,” he said as they climbed into the taxi,

“come back to this place for me. It’s the one thing I do every year. On this day.”

“You’ll be back next year,” she said, reaching out to take his hand.

F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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O N T H E OT H E R S I D E of Edinburgh, in another season, Cat, an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties, stood at Isabel Dalhousie’s front door, her finger poised over the bell. She gazed at the stonework. She noticed that in parts the discoloration was becoming more pronounced. Above the triangular gable of her aunt’s bedroom window, the stone was flaking slightly, and a patch had fallen off here and there, like a ripened scab, exposing fresh skin below. This slow decline had its own charms; a house, like anything else, should not be denied the dignity of natural ageing—within reason, of course.

For the most part, the house was in good order; a discreet and sympathetic house, in spite of its size. And it was known, too, for its hospitality. Everyone who called there—irrespective of their mission—would be courteously received and offered, if the time was appropriate, a glass of dry white wine in spring and summer and red in autumn and winter. They would then be listened to, again with courtesy, for Isabel believed in giving moral attention to everyone. This made her profoundly egalitarian, though not in the non-discriminating sense of many contemporary egalitarians, who sometimes ignore the real moral differences between people (good and evil are not the same, Isabel would say). She felt uncomfortable with moral relativists and their penchant for non-judgementalism. But of course we must be judgemental, she said, when there is something to be judged.

Isabel had studied philosophy and had a part-time job as general editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. It was not a demanding job in terms of the time it required, and it was badly 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h paid; in fact, at Isabel’s own suggestion, rising production costs had been partly offset by a cut in her own salary. Not that payment mattered; her share of the Louisiana and Gulf Land Company, left to her by her mother— her sainted American mother, as she called her—provided more than she could possibly need.

Isabel was, in fact, wealthy, although that was a word that she did not like to use, especially of herself. She was indifferent to material wealth, although she was attentive to what she described, with characteristic modesty, as her minor projects of giving (which were actually very generous).

“And what are these projects?” Cat had once asked.

Isabel looked embarrassed. “Charitable ones, I suppose. Or eleemosynary if you prefer long words. Nice word that—

eleemosynary . . . But I don’t normally talk about it.”

Cat frowned. There were things about her aunt that puzzled her. If one gave to charity, then why not mention it?

“One must be discreet,” Isabel continued. She was not one for circumlocution, but she believed that one should never refer to one’s own good works. A good work, once drawn attention to by its author, inevitably became an exercise in self-congratulation. That was what was wrong with the lists of names of donors in the opera programmes. Would they have given if their generosity was not going to be recorded in the programme? Isabel thought that in many cases they would not. Of course, if the only way one could raise money for the arts was through appealing to vanity, then it was probably worth doing.

But her own name never appeared in such lists, a fact which had not gone unnoticed in Edinburgh.

“She’s mean,” whispered some. “She gives nothing away.”

They were wrong, of course, as the uncharitable so often F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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are. In one year, Isabel, unrecorded by name in any programme and amongst numerous other donations, had given eight thousand pounds to Scottish Opera: three thousand towards a production of Hansel and Gretel, and five thousand to help secure a fine Italian tenor for a Cavalleria Rusticana performed in the ill-fitting costumes of nineteen-thirties Italy, complete with brown-shirted Fascisti in the chorus.

“Such fine singing from your Fascisti,” Isabel had remarked at the party which followed the production.

“They love to dress up as fascists,” the chorus master had responded. “Something to do with only being in the chorus, I suspect.”

This remark had been greeted with silence. Some of the Fascisti had overheard it.

“Only in the most attenuated way,” the chorus master had added, looking into his glass of wine. “But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps not.”

“ M O N E Y,” said Cat. “That’s the problem. Money.”

Isabel handed Cat a glass of wine. “It invariably is,” she said.

“Yes,” Cat went on. “I suppose that if I were prepared to offer enough, I would be able to get somebody suitable to stand in for me. But I can’t. I have to run it as a business, and I can’t make a loss.”

Isabel nodded. Cat owned a delicatessen just a few streets away, in Bruntsfield, and although it was successful, she knew that the line between profitability and failure was a narrow one.

As it was, she had one full-time employee to pay, Eddie, a young man who seemed to be on the verge of tears much of the time, 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h haunted, thought Isabel, by something which Cat could not, or would not, speak about. Eddie could be left in control for short periods, but not for a week it seemed.

“He panics,” said Cat. “It gets too much for him and he panics.”

Cat explained to Isabel that she had been invited to a wedding in Italy and wanted to go with a party of friends. They would attend the wedding in Messina and then move north to a house which they had rented for a week in Umbria. The time of year was ideal; the weather would be perfect.

“I have to go,” said Cat. “I just have to.”

Isabel smiled. Cat would never ask outright for a favour, but her intention was transparent. “I suppose . . . ,” she began. “I suppose I could do it again. I rather enjoyed it last time. And if you remember, I made more than you usually do. The takings went up.”

This amused Cat. “You probably overcharged,” she said.

And then a pause, before she continued: “I didn’t raise the issue to get you to . . . I wouldn’t want to force you.”

“Of course not,” said Isabel.

“But it would make all the difference,” Cat went on quickly.

“You know how everything works. And Eddie likes you.”

Isabel was surprised. Did Eddie have a view on her? He hardly ever spoke to her, and certainly never smiled. But the thought that he liked her made her warm towards him. Perhaps he might confide in her, as he had confided in Cat, and she would be able to help him in some way. Or she could put him in touch with somebody: there were people who could help in such circumstances; she could pay for it if necessary.

They discussed the details. Cat would be leaving in ten days’ time. If Isabel came for a hand-over day before then, she F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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could be shown the current stock and the order book. Consign-ments of wine and salamis were expected while Cat was away, and these would have to be attended to. And then there was the whole issue of making sure that the surfaces were cleaned—

a fussy procedure subject to an entire litany of regulations.

Eddie knew all about that, but you had to watch him; he was funny about olives and often put them in containers marked down for coleslaw.

“It will be far more difficult than editing the Review of Applied Ethics, ” said Cat, smiling. “Far more difficult.”

Which might have been true, thought Isabel, although she did not say it. Editing a journal was largely repetitive work: sending letters to reviewers and assessors; discussing deadlines with copy editors and printers. All that was mundane work; reading the papers and dealing with authors was a different matter. That required insight and a large measure of tact. In her experience, the authors of papers which were turned down almost invariably proved resentful. And the more incompetent or eccentric the paper—and there were many of those—the more truculent the disappointed author became. One such author—or his paper—lay on her desk before her at the time.

“The Rightness of Vice”: a title which reminded her of a recent book she had reviewed, In Praise of Sin. But while In Praise of Sin had been a serious investigation of the limits of moralism—

and ultimately claimed to be in favour of virtue—“The Rightness of Vice” had no truck with virtue. It was about the alleged benefits for character of vice, provided that the vice in question was what a person really wanted to do. That was defensible—

just—thought Isabel, provided that the vice was a tolerable one (drinking, gluttony, and so on), but how could one possibly argue in favour of the sorts of vices which the author of the 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h paper had in mind? It was impossible, thought Isabel. Who could defend . . . She went over in her mind some of the vices explored by the author, but stopped. Even by their Latin names, these vices barely bore thinking about. Did people really do that? The answer, she supposed, was that they did, but she very much doubted that they would expect a philosopher to spring to their defence. And yet here was an Australian professor of philosophy doing just that. Well, she had a responsibility to her readers. She could not defend the indefensible. She would send the article back with a short note, something like: Dear Professor, I’m so sorry, but we just can’t. People feel very strongly about these things, you know. And they would blame me for what you say.

They really would. Yours sincerely, Isabel Dalhousie.

Isabel put the thought of vice behind her and turned her attention back to Cat. “It may be difficult,” she said. “But I think I’ll manage.”

“You can say no,” said Cat.

“Can, but shall not,” said Isabel. “You go to the wedding.”

Cat smiled. “I’ll reciprocate some day,” she said. “I’ll be you for a few weeks and you can go away.”

“You could never be me,” said Isabel. “And I could never be you. We never know enough about another person to be him or her. We think we do, but we can never be sure.”

“You know what I mean,” said Cat. “I’ll come and live here and reply to your letters and so on while you get away.”

Isabel nodded. “I’ll bear that in mind. But there’s no need to think of reciprocation. I suspect that I shall enjoy myself.”

“You will,” said Cat. “You’ll enjoy the customers—or some of them.”

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CAT S TAY E D, and they ate a light supper in the garden room, enjoying the last of the evening sun. It was June—close to the solstice—and it never became truly dark in Edinburgh, even at midnight. The summer had been slow to come, but had now arrived and the days were long and warm.

“I’ve been feeling lazy in this weather,” Isabel remarked to Cat. “Working in your shop is exactly what I need to wake me up.”

“And Italy is exactly what I need to wind me down,” said Cat.

“Not that the wedding itself should be quiet—anything but.”

Isabel enquired who was getting married. She knew few of Cat’s friends, and tended to get them mixed up. There were too many Kirstys and Craigs, Isabel thought; they had become interchangeable in her mind.

“Kirsty,” said Cat. “You’ve met her with me once or twice, I think.”

“Oh,” said Isabel. “Kirsty.”

“She met an Italian last year when she was teaching English in Catania. Salvatore. They fell for one another and that was it.”

For a moment Isabel was silent. She had fallen for John Liamor in Cambridge all those years ago, and that had been it too. She had gone so far as to marry him and had tolerated his unfaithfulness until it had been too much to bear. But all these Kirstys were so sensible; they would not make a bad choice.

“What does he do?” Isabel asked. She half expected Cat not to know; it always surprised her that her niece seemed uninterested in, or unaware of, what people did. For Isabel, it was fundamentally important information if one were even to begin to understand somebody.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat smiled. “Kirsty doesn’t really know,” she said. “I know that’ll surprise you, but she says that whenever she’s asked Salvatore he’s become evasive. He says that he’s some sort of busi-nessman who works for his father. But she can’t find out exactly what this business is.”

Isabel stared at Cat. It was clear to her—immediately clear—what Salvatore’s father did.

“And she doesn’t care?” Isabel ventured. “She’s still prepared to marry him?”

“Why not?” said Cat. “Just because you don’t know what happens in somebody’s office doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t marry them.”

“But what if this . . . this office is headquarters of a protection racket? What then?”

Cat laughed. “A protection racket? Don’t be ridiculous.

There’s nothing to suggest that it’s a protection racket.”

Isabel thought that any accusations of ridiculousness were being made in exactly the wrong direction.

“Cat,” she said quietly. “It’s Italy. In the south of Italy if you won’t disclose what you do, then it means one thing. Organised crime. That’s just the way it is. And the most common form of organised crime is the protection racket.”

Cat stared at her aunt. “Nonsense,” she said. “You have an overheated imagination.”

“And Kirsty’s is distinctly underheated,” retorted Isabel. “I simply can’t imagine marrying somebody who would hide that sort of thing from me. I couldn’t marry a gangster.”

“Salvatore’s not a gangster,” said Cat. “He’s nice. I met him several times and I liked him.”

Isabel looked at the floor. The fact that Cat could say this merely emphasised her inability to tell good men from bad. This F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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Kirsty was in for a rude awakening, with her handsome young mafioso husband. He would want a compliant, unquestioning wife, who would look the other way when it came to his dealings with his cronies. A Scotswoman was unlikely to understand this; she would expect equality and consideration, which this Salvatore would not give her once they were married. It was a disaster in the making, and Isabel thought that Cat simply could not see it, as she had been unable to see through Toby, her previous boyfriend; he of the Lladró porcelain looks and the tendency to wear crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers. Perhaps Cat would come back from Italy with an Italian of her own.

Now that would be interesting.

C H A P T E R T W O

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WHEN IT CAME TO a Queen’s Hall concert, Isabel Dalhousie had a strategy. The hall had been a church, and the upstairs gallery, which ran round three sides of the hall, was designed to be uncomfortable. The Church of Scotland had always believed that one should sit up straight, especially when the minister was in full flow, and this principle had been embodied in its Scottish ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, the upstairs seats prevented any leaning back, and indeed were inimical to too much spreading out in any direction. For this reason, Isabel would attend concerts in the Queen’s Hall only if she could arrange a ticket for downstairs, where ordinary seats, rather than pews, were set out in the main body of the kirk, and only in the first few rows which afforded a reasonable view of the stage.

Her friend Jamie had arranged the ticket for her that evening, and he knew all about her requirements.

“Third row from the front,” he assured her on the telephone. “On the aisle. Perfect.”

“And who’ll be sitting next to me?” Isabel asked. “Perfection implies an agreeable neighbour.”

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Jamie laughed. “Somebody wonderful,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what I asked for.”

“Last time I was in the Queen’s Hall,” Isabel observed, “I had that strange man from the National Library. You know, the one who’s the expert on Highland place names, and who fidgets.

Nobody will sit next to him normally, and I believe he was actually hit over the head with a rolled-up programme at a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert—out of sheer irritation. No excuse, of course, but understandable. I have, of course, never hit anybody with a programme. Not once.”

Jamie laughed. This was a typical Isabel comment, and it delighted him. Everybody else was so literal; she could turn a situation on its head and render it painfully funny by some peculiar observation. “Maybe it’s the way the music takes him,”

he said. “My pupils fidget a lot.”

Jamie was a musician, a bassoonist who supplemented his earnings as a member of a chamber orchestra with the proceeds of teaching. His pupils were mostly teenagers, who traipsed up the stairs of his Stockbridge flat once a week for their lessons.

For the most part they were promising players, but there were several who attended under parental duress, and these were the ones who fidgeted or looked out of the window.

Isabel enjoyed a close friendship with Jamie—or at least as close a friendship as could flourish across an age gap of fifteen years. She had met him during the six months that he had spent with Cat, and she had been disappointed when her niece and this good-looking young man, with his sallow complexion and his en brosse haircut, had separated. It was entirely Cat’s doing, and it had taken all of Isabel’s self-restraint not to upbraid her niece for what she saw as a disastrous mistake. Jamie was a gift: a wonderful, gentle gift from the gods—sent straight down from 1 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Parnassus—and Cat was walking away from him. How could she possibly do it?

Over the months that followed, the torch which Jamie continued to carry for Cat had been kept alight by Isabel. She had barely discussed the matter with him, but there was an unspoken understanding that Jamie was still part of the family, as it were, and that by remaining in contact with Isabel, the chance of a resumption of the affair was at least kept alive. But the bond between them had gone deeper than that. It appeared that Jamie needed a confidante, and Isabel fulfilled that role with instinctive sympathy. And for her part, she enjoyed Jamie’s company immensely: he sang while she accompanied him on the piano; she cooked meals for him; they gossiped—all of which he appeared to enjoy as much as she did.

She was content with what she had in this friendship. She knew that she could telephone Jamie at any time and that he would come up from his flat in Saxe-Coburg Street and share a glass of wine and talk. From time to time they went out for dinner together, or to a concert when Jamie had spare tickets. He took it for granted that she would be at every performance of his chamber orchestra, in Edinburgh or in Glasgow, and she was, although Isabel did not enjoy going through to Glasgow. Such an unsettling city, she confessed. And Jamie smiled: what was unsettling about Glasgow was that it was real; there was a meatiness about life in Glasgow that was quite different from the rarefied atmosphere of Edinburgh. And of course he liked that: he had studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and remembered a student life of late-night parties and bars and dinners in cheap Indian restaurants off the Byres Road, all against the smell of the river and the sound of the ships and the factories.

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Now, sitting in her seat in the third row—as promised—

Isabel studied the programme for that evening’s concert. It was a charity concert in aid of a Middle East relief fund, and an eclectic selection of local musicians had offered their services.

There was a Haydn cello concerto, a ragbag of Bach, and a selection of anthems from the Edinburgh Academy Chorus. Jamie’s chamber orchestra was not performing that night, but he was playing the contrabassoon in an impromptu ensemble that was to accompany the singers. Isabel ran her eye down the list of performers: almost all of them were known to her.

She settled back in her seat and glanced up towards the gallery. A young child, the younger sister perhaps of one of the members of the Academy Chorus, was gazing down over the parapet, met her eye, and lifted a hand in a hesitant wave. Isabel waved back, and smiled. Behind the child, she saw the figure of the man from the National Library—he went to every concert, and fidgeted at them all.

The hall was now almost full, and only a few latecomers were still to find their way to their seats. Isabel looked down at her programme and then, discreetly, glanced at her neighbour on the left. She was a middle-aged woman with her hair tied back in a bun and a vaguely disapproving expression on her face.

A thin-faced man, drained of colour, sat beside her, staring up at the ceiling. The man glanced at the woman, and then looked away. The woman looked at the man, and then half turned to face Isabel on the pretext of adjusting the red paisley shawl she had about her shoulders.

“Such an interesting programme,” whispered Isabel. “A real treat.”

The woman’s expression softened. “We hear so little Haydn,”

she said, almost conspiratorially. “They don’t give us enough.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“I suppose not,” said Isabel, but she wondered: Precisely who took it upon themselves to ration Haydn?

“They need to wake up,” muttered the man. “When did they last do The Creation? Can you remember? I can’t.”

Isabel looked back at her programme, as if to assess the quota of Haydn, but the lights were dimmed and the members of a string quartet appeared from the door at the back of the stage to take their places. There was enthusiastic applause led, it seemed to Isabel, by her neighbours.

“Haydn,” whispered the woman, transformed. And the man nodded.

Isabel suppressed a smile. The world, she supposed, was full of enthusiasts and fans of one kind or another. There were people who loved all sorts of extraordinary things and lived for their passions. Haydn was a perfectly respectable passion, as were trains, she supposed. W. H. Auden, or WHA as she called him, had appreciated steam engines, and had confessed that when he was a boy he had loved a steam engine which he thought “every bit as beautiful” as a person to whom his poem was addressed. You are my steam engine, one might say, in much the same way as the French addressed their lovers as mon petit chou, my little cabbage. How strange was human passion in its expression.

The quartet tuned up and then began their Haydn, which they played with distinction and which in due course prompted rapturous applause from Isabel’s row. This was followed by the Bach, which took them up to the interval. Isabel often remained in her seat during intervals, but it was a warm evening and thirst drove her into the bar, where she joined a line of people waiting for drinks. Fortunately the service was efficient and she did not have to wait long. Nursing her white wine F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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spritzer, she made her way to one of the small tables under the mezzanine.

She looked at the milling crowd. A few people greeted her from the other side of the room—with nods of the head and smiles. Where was Jamie? she wondered. He would be playing immediately after the interval and might be in the green room, preparing his bassoon reed. She would see him after the concert, she imagined, and they might enjoy a drink together, discussing the performance.

Then she saw him, standing in a knot of people in the corner of the bar. One of them she recognised as another member of the chamber orchestra, a young man called Brian, who came from Aberdeen and who played the viola. And then, immediately next to Jamie, a tall girl, with blond hair and wearing a strappy red dress, who was holding a drink in her left hand and talking, and who now turned and leant up against Jamie. Isabel watched. She saw Jamie smile at the girl and place a hand on her shoulder, lightly, and then his hand moved up and brushed the hair from her forehead, and she returned his smile and slipped her free arm round his waist.

Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air.

She put down her glass and stared at the table for a few moments before she raised her eyes again and looked in their direction.

Jamie was looking at his watch and saying something to the viola player, and to the girl too, and then he unwound himself from her clasp and moved off towards the green-room door and the girl looked at one of the paintings on the wall—amateurish, characterless landscapes that the Queen’s Hall was trying in vain to sell.

2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel stood up. Making her way back to the hall she had to walk past the girl, but she did not look at her. Back in her seat she sat down heavily, as if dazed, and stared at the programme.

She saw Jamie’s name and the name of the viola player, and her heart was beating hard within her.

She watched as the players assembled, and then the Academy Chorus, young singers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, the boys in white shirts and dark trousers and the girls in their white blouses and navy blue pleated skirts. Then the conductor came on, and she watched him rather than look directly at Jamie, who seemed to be looking for her now, to smile discreetly at her in the audience as he often did.

They began with Howells, which Isabel hardly heard. Who was this girl? There was no girlfriend—not since Cat—and she had simply assumed that there would not be one. He had always made it clear that he wanted Cat back, and would wait for as long as it took. And she, Isabel, had gone along with this, and all the time what was happening was that she was becoming increasingly possessive of Jamie without ever having to acknowledge it. Now there was another woman, a girl really, and there was an obvious intimacy between them which would exclude her, as it would have to do, and that would be the end of everything.

When the Howells finished, she stole a glance at Jamie, but looked away again quickly because she fancied that he was looking at another part of the hall, where perhaps the girl was sitting. The chorus moved on to a Taverner motet, grave and echoing, and then to a John Ireland anthem, “Many Waters Cannot Quench Love.” Isabel listened now. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. No they cannot; they cannot. Love is as strong as death; it is stronger; it is stronger.

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At the end of the concert, she stood up as soon as the applause had abated. Normally she would have left by the back door, through the bar, where she would have seen Jamie coming out of the green room, but not this evening. She was one of the first out, into the busy night street where there were people about with business other than concerts. Then she walked briskly towards the Meadows, following the path beside the traffic, walking quickly, as if in a rush to get home; though nothing awaited her at home but the solace of the familiar.

The night sky was still light, a glow to the west, and it was warm. Many waters cannot quench love: the anthem’s setting remained in her ears, repeating itself; a tune so powerful that it might gird one against the disappointments of life, rather than make one aware that our attempts to subdue the pain of unre-quited love—of impossible love, of love that we are best to put away and not to think about—tended not to work, and only made the wounds of love more painful.

She stopped at the crossing light and waited for the signal to walk. A young woman, of student age, was at her side, waiting too. She looked at Isabel, hesitated for a moment, and then reached out to touch her gently on the arm.

“Are you all right?” she asked. She had seen the tears.

Isabel nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

C H A P T E R T H R E E

E

OF COURSE it was much better in the clear light of day.

When she went downstairs the following morning, Isabel might not have forgotten about her momentary weakness, but at least she was back in control of herself. She knew that what she had experienced the previous evening was a sudden rush of emotion—the emotion in question being jealousy, no less. Emotional states of this sort came on quickly and were difficult to manage when first experienced, but the whole point about being a rational actor was that one could assert control. She, Isabel Dalhousie, was quite capable of holding negative emotions in check and sending them back to where they belonged.

Now, where was that? In the dark reaches of the Freudian id?

She smiled at the thought. How well-named was the id—

a rough, un-house-trained, shadowy thing, wanting to do all those anarchic deeds that the ego and super-ego frowned upon.

Much Freudian theory was scientifically shaky, even if it was such a literary treat to read, but Isabel had always thought that of all the Freudian conceits the id was probably the most credible. The bundle of urges and wants that went with being a physical being: the need for food, the need to reproduce—those F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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two alone were enough to cause any amount of difficulty, and indeed were at the bottom of most disputes between people.

Arguments over space, food, and sex: id business. This is what humanity’s conflicts were eventually reduced to.

By the time she had prepared her coffee, the whole affair had been sorted out and defused. It was natural to feel jealousy over those for whom one had a particular affection, and so it was perfectly natural that she should have felt the way she had when she saw Jamie with that girl. The sight had brought it home to her that Jamie was not hers; she may feel strongly about him, but that feeling could never be allowed to change the fact that there was between them nothing more than friendship.

She had hoped that Jamie and Cat would get together again, but she knew full well how unrealistic that hope was.

Jamie must come to understand this sooner or later, and that meant that he would look for somebody else, as any young man would do. That girl at the concert, with her posture of adoration for Jamie, would probably be ideal. It would probably mean the loss of the comfortable intimacy which Isabel and Jamie currently enjoyed. That was to be regretted, of course, but the right thing for her to do would be to take pleasure in whatever happiness it brought Jamie. It would be like freeing a bird that one had temporarily held captive. The bird catcher may feel sad at the loss of his companion, but he must think only of the happiness of the released creature. That is what she must do: it was obvious. She must try to like that young woman and then let Jamie go with her blessing.

I S A B E L H A D F I N I S H E D her first cup of coffee and eaten her morning allocation of two slices of toast and marmalade by the 2 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h time that her housekeeper, Grace, arrived. Grace, who was a woman of roughly Isabel’s age, had kept house for Isabel’s father and now did the same for her. She was a woman of clear views, who had never married—in spite of what she described as innu-merable offers—and Isabel often used her as a sounding board for ideas and opinions. On many issues they tended not to agree, but Isabel enjoyed Grace’s perspective, which was almost always a surprising one.

“I may not be a philosopher,” Grace once pointed out, “but I have no difficulty in knowing where I stand. I cannot understand all this doubt.”

“But we have to doubt,” said Isabel. “Thinking is doubting.

It amounts to the same thing.”

Grace’s retort had come quickly. “It certainly does not. I think about something, and then I make up my mind. Doubt doesn’t come into it.”

“Well,” said Isabel, “people differ. You’re lucky that you’re so certain. I’m more given to doubt. Maybe it’s a question of temperament.”

That morning, Isabel was not in the mood for an exchange of this nature, and so she confined herself to a question about Grace’s nephew, Bruce. This young man was a Scottish nationalist, who believed firmly in the independence of Scotland.

Grace herself had at times been influenced by his fervour, and muttered darkly about London, but this had never lasted. She was by nature a conservative, and the Union was something too settled to do anything radical about.

“Bruce is off to some political rally,” she answered. “They go up to Bannockburn every year and listen to speeches. They get all whipped up, but then they come home again and go off about their business like everybody else. It’s a hobby for F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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him, I suppose. He used to collect stamps, and then he took up nationalism.”

Isabel smiled. “Such a striking-looking boy, in his kilt and his bonnet. And Bruce is such a good name, isn’t it, for a patriot?

Could one be a convincing Scottish nationalist if one were called, say, Julian?”

“Probably not,” said Grace. “Did you know, by the way, that they’re also talking about a boycott of the railways until they stop referring to English breakfasts in their restaurant cars?”

“So much for them to do,” mused Isabel. “Such a constructive contribution to national life.”

“Of course they do have a point,” said Grace. “Look at the way Scotland’s been treated. How does the song go? Such a parcel of rogues in a nation . . . ”

Isabel steered the conversation away from the subject of Bruce.

“I saw Jamie with a girl last night,” she said simply, watching for Grace’s reaction as she spoke.

“Another girl?”

“Yes,” she said. “A girl at a concert.”

Grace nodded. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” she said.

“I’ve seen them too.”

Isabel was silent for a moment; the pronounced beating of the heart the physical manifestation of the emotion. Then:

“With a blond-haired girl? Tall?”

“Yes.”

Of course it would be the same girl, and she should not have felt any surprise. But she asked for details, nonetheless, and Grace explained.

“It was near the university. There’s a café there near the back of the museum. They put tables out in the good weather 2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and people sit out and drink coffee. They were there, at a table.

They didn’t see me as I walked past. But it was Jamie and a girl.

This girl.”

“I know the place you’re talking about,” said Isabel. “It has a strange name. Iguana, or something like that.”

“Everything has a strange name these days,” said Grace.

Isabel said nothing. The feeling of the previous evening had momentarily returned—a feeling of utter emptiness and of being alone. It was not an unfamiliar feeling, of course. She remembered that when she had first realised that John Liamor was being unfaithful to her, with a girl who had come to Cambridge from Dublin to talk to him about his research, this is what she had felt. It was the feeling of having something taken away from her, out of her, like being winded. But John Liamor was her past, and she was getting over him. For years she had been in his thrall, bound to thoughts of him, unable to trust men as a result. Should she now allow herself to be caught up in something which had the same risk of pain and rejection?

Of course not.

Grace was watching her. She knows, thought Isabel. She knows. It is that transparent, the disappointment of the woman who has learnt that her young lover is behaving exactly as a young lover should be expected to behave—except that Jamie and I are not lovers.

“It had to happen,” said Grace suddenly, looking down at the floor as she spoke. “He would have gone back to Cat if she would have had him, but she wouldn’t. So what is he to do?

Men don’t wait any more.”

Isabel was staring out of the window. There was a clematis climbing up the wall that divided her garden from next door, and it was in full flower now, large blossoms of striated pink. Grace F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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thought that she was concerned about Cat; she had not worked out that this was personal distress. And indeed there was every reason for Grace to think that, Isabel reflected, because otherwise she would have to conclude that this was a case of an aunt—yes, an aunt—falling for the boyfriend of the niece, which was an altogether unseemly thing to do, and not the sort of thing that happened in Grace’s Edinburgh. But aunts have ids, she thought, and then smiled at the thought. There would be no emptiness any more, because she would again will herself to be pleased.

“You’re quite right,” said Isabel. “Jamie could hardly be expected to wait for ever. I despair of Cat.” She paused before adding, “And I hope that this girl, whoever she is, is good for him.” The sentiment sounded trite, but then didn’t most good sentiments sound trite? It was hard to make goodness—and good people—sound interesting. Yet the good were worthy of note, of course, because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair.

“Let’s hope,” said Grace, who had now opened a cupboard and was extracting a vacuum cleaner. As she brought it out and began to unwind the electric cord, she half turned to look at Isabel.

“I thought that you might be upset,” she said. “You and Jamie are so close. I thought that you might be . . .”

Isabel supplied the word. “Jealous?”

Grace frowned. “If you put it that way. Sorry to think that, it’s just that when I walked past that table the other day that’s how I felt. I don’t want her to have him. He’s ours, you see.”

Isabel laughed. “Yes, he is ours, or so we like to think. But 3 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he isn’t really, is he? I had a dove. Do you know that line? The poet has a dove, and the sweet dove dies. But it could equally well fly away.”

“Your Mr. W. H. Auden?”

“Oh no, not him. But he did write about love quite a lot. And I suppose he must have felt very jealous, because he had a friend who went off with other people and all the time Auden was waiting in the background. It must have been very sad for him.”

“It’s all very sad,” said Grace. “It always is.”

Isabel thought about this. She would not allow herself to be sad; how sad to be sad. So she stood up briskly and rubbed her hands. “I’m going to have a scone with my coffee,” she said.

“Would you like one too?”

C H A P T E R F O U R

E

ISABEL HAD ARRANGED with Cat that she would call in at the delicatessen that afternoon and go over various matters. Cat was leaving for Italy the following day, and she wanted to make sure that Isabel knew how everything worked. Eddie knew most of the food-handling regulations and could see that everything was in order from that point of view, but Isabel would have to be shown the special customer list which gave the details of who needed what. And there was also the business of the burglar alarm, which was unduly complicated, and which must not be allowed to go off in error.

The delicatessen was only ten minutes’ walk from Isabel’s house. She made her way along Merchiston Crescent, past the line of Victorian flats that snaked along the south side of the road. Work was being done on the long building’s stonework, and several masons were standing on a scaffolding platform, while below them, at the foot of the structure, a stone-cutting machine whined and threw up dust. Isabel looked up and one of the men waved. Immediately to the side of the scaffolding, a woman stood at a window, looking out. Isabel knew who this woman was: the wife of a scholarly man who wrote obscure 3 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h books about pyramids and sacred geometry. This was one of the reassuring things about Edinburgh; if a person wrote about pyramids and sacred geometry, then the neighbours would know about it. In other cities even such an original might be anonymous.

She arrived at the delicatessen in Bruntsfield Place and found Cat standing be-aproned in the doorway.

“You look just like an old-fashioned grocer,” remarked Isabel.

“Standing there, waiting to welcome your customers.”

“I was thinking about a wedding present,” said Cat. “I suppose that they have everything they need, as everybody does these days.”

Much of it ill-gotten, Isabel said to herself, remembering the conversation about the gangster father. Though so much was ill-gotten, when one came to think of it. How did anybody become rich other than by exploiting others? And even those who did not exploit could enjoy the fruits of exploitation. Rich Western societies were wealthy because of imperialism, which had been a form of theft, and now the poor in those rich societies strove to obtain more generous payments from the state, which could only pay them because of the position of relative economic advantage which past plunder had set up. Living, just living, it seemed, meant that one had to participate in a crime; unless, of course, one changed one’s definition of a crime to include only those things that one did oneself. And surely this was the only practical way of looking at it. If we were all responsible for the misdeeds of the governments that represent us, thought Isabel, then the moral burden would be just too great.

With these burdens on her mind, she went inside, where Eddie, wearing the same style of apron as Cat, was opening F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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a large new hessian sack of wholewheat flour, leaving the unpicked neck open for customers to dig into with a scoop. He looked up at Isabel and smiled, which she thought was progress.

She walked over to him and held out her hand to shake his; Eddie lifted up his hand, which was covered in flour, and grinned.

Cat led the way into the small office which she kept at the back. It was a room which Isabel had always liked, with its shelves of samples and its well-thumbed Italian food producers’

catalogues. Her eye was caught by a large poster on the wall advertising Filippo Berio olive oil: a man riding an old-fashioned bicycle down one of those dusty white roads which meander across the Tuscan countryside. Underneath the poster, Cat had pinned a leaflet from a Parmesan cheese factory which showed great rounds of cheese, hundreds of them, stacked up in a ware-house. She had been there, she thought, to that very factory, some years ago when she had been visiting a friend in Reggio Emilia, and they had gone to buy cheese direct from the factory.

There had been a mynah bird in a cage in the front office, where they cut and wrapped the cheese for visitors, and the bird had glared at the visitors before screeching, scatologically, Bagno, bagno! Later she had heard that the bird had been relegated to a cage outside after a visiting Brussels bureaucrat had complained that the hygiene regulations of the European Union, that vast pettifoggery, were being flouted by the juxtaposition of bird and cheese.

“You don’t have a sliver of Parmesan, do you?” she asked. “I have a sudden urge. Inexplicable.”

Cat laughed. “Of course. I’ve got a magnificent cheese which we’re working through at the moment. It’s just the right age and it’s delicious.” She stepped over to the door and called 3 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out to Eddie, asking him to bring in a small piece of the cheese.

Then she took down a bottle from a shelf, uncorked it, and poured a small quantity of Madeira into a glass.

“Here,” she said. “This will be perfect with the Parmesan.”

Isabel sat down with Cat at her desk and went over the list which her niece had prepared for her. As she did so, she sipped at the Madeira, which was strong and nutty, and savoured the generous portion of cheese which Eddie had put on a plate for her. The cheese was rich and crumbly, a good cheese-mile away from the cardboard-like powder which people assumed was real Parmesan but which was nothing to do with Italy. Then, when everything had been explained, Cat passed over to her a small bunch of keys. Eddie would lock up that night, and the following morning Isabel would be in charge.

“I feel very responsible,” said Isabel. “All this food. The shop. Locks and keys. Eddie.”

“If anything goes wrong, just ask Eddie,” said Cat reassuringly. “Or you can call me in Italy. I’ll leave a number.”

“I won’t do that,” said Isabel. “Not at your wedding.”

Not yours, she thought, but you know what I mean; and then, unbidden, there came into her mind a picture of Cat at the altar, in full bridal dress, and a Sicilian bridegroom, in dark glasses, and outside one of those raggedy brass bands that seem to materialise out of nowhere in Italian towns, playing old sax-horns and tubas, and the sun above, and olive trees, and Mr.

Berio himself laughing as he tossed rice into the air.

She raised her almost-drained glass of Madeira in a toast to Cat. “To the wedding,” she said with a smile.

F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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S H E WA L K E D B AC K , conscious of the keys in the pocket of her jacket. Grace had left by the time she arrived at the house and everything looked neat and tidy, as Grace always left it: The house has been graced, she thought. Grace was a most atypical professional housekeeper, a woman whose interests ran well beyond the domestic, who read novels and took a close interest in politics (even if her allegiances were notoriously shifting in that respect); a woman who could have had much more of a career had she chosen but who had been put to this work by an unambitious mother. Isabel would not have had a housekeeper had she been given the choice, but there had been no choice; on the death of Isabel’s father, Grace had assumed that she would remain in office, and Isabel had not had the heart to question this. Now she was glad that Grace had remained, and could not imagine what life would be without Grace and her views. And Isabel, who did good by stealth, had quietly placed money in an account for Grace’s benefit, but had not yet revealed the fund’s existence. She assumed that Grace would retire one day, even if there had been no mention of this. Still, the money was there, ready for her when she needed it.

She went into the kitchen. Grace left notes for her on the kitchen table—notes about household supplies and telephone messages. There was a large brown envelope waiting for her, and a piece of paper with a few lines in Grace’s handwriting.

Isabel picked up the envelope first. It had not arrived with the normal morning delivery because it had been misdelivered to a neighbour, who had dropped it off. Isabel lived at number 6

while the neighbour lived at number 16, and a harassed postal 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h official could easily make a mistake; but it was never bills that were misdelivered, Isabel reflected—bills always found their target. The envelope was simply addressed to the editor, and by its weight it was a manuscript. She always looked at the stamp and postmark first, rather than at the name and address of the sender: an American stamp, an aviator looking up into the clouds with that open-browed expression that befits aviators, and a Seattle postmark. She set the envelope aside and looked at the note which Grace had left. There had been a telephone call from her dentist, about a change in the timing for her check-up, and a call from the author of a paper which the Review had accepted for publication: Isabel knew that this author was troublesome and that there would be some complaint. Then, at the bottom of the list, Grace had written: And Jamie called too. He wants to talk to you, he says. Soon. This was followed by an exclamation mark—or was it? Grace liked to comment on the messages she took for Isabel, and an exclamation mark would have been an eloquent remark. But was this an exclamation mark or a slip of the pencil?

Isabel picked up the envelope and walked through to her study. Jamie often telephoned; this was nothing special, and yet she was intrigued. Why would he want to talk to her soon? She wondered whether it was anything to do with the girl. Had Jamie sensed that there was something wrong? It was possible that he had waited for her after the Queen’s Hall concert, and he might even have seen her sneaking away. He was not an insensitive person who would be indifferent to the feelings of others, and he could well have understood precisely why she had left without speaking to him. But of course if he had realised that, then that could change everything between them.

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She did not want him to think of her as some hopeless admirer, an object of pity.

She moved towards the telephone, but stopped. The hopeless admirer would be eager to call the object of her affections.

She was not that. She was the independent woman who happened to have a friendship with a young man. She would not behave like some overly eager spinster, desperate for any scrap of contact with the man on whom her affections had settled.

She would not telephone him. If he wanted to speak to her, then he would be the one to do the calling. She immediately felt ashamed; it was a thought worthy of a moody, plotting teenager, not of a woman of her age and her experience of life. She closed her eyes for a moment: this was a matter of will, of voluntas. She was not enamoured of Jamie; she was pleased that he had found a girlfriend. She was in control.

She opened her eyes. Around her were the familiar surroundings of her study: the books reaching up to the ceiling, the desk with its reassuring clutter, the quiet, rational world of the Review of Applied Ethics. The telephone was on the desk, and she picked up the receiver and dialled Jamie’s number.

Isabel, said a recorded Jamie. I am not in. This is not me you’re talking to; well it is, actually, but it’s a recording. I need to talk to you. Do you mind? May I see you tomorrow? I can call round any time. Phone me later.

She replaced the receiver in its cradle. Messages from people who were not there were unsettling, rather like letters from the dead. She had received such a letter once from a contribu-tor to the Review whose article had been turned down for publication. I cannot understand why you are unwilling to publish this, he had written. And then, a few days later, she had heard 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that he was dead, and she had reflected on how her act had made his last few days unhappy; not that she could have reached any other decision, but the imminence of death might make one ponder one’s actions more carefully. If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who had only a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.

She picked up the envelope from Seattle and slit it open, carefully, gently, as if handling a document of sacramental significance. There was a covering letter—the University of Washington—but she put this to one side, again gently, and looked at the title page of the manuscript. “The Man Who Received a Bolt in the Brain and Became a Psychopath.” She sighed. Ever since Dr. Sacks had written The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat there had been a flurry of similar titles. And had not this whole issue of brain and personality disorder been explored by Professor Damasio, who had dealt with this precise case of the ironworker and his bolt in the brain? But then she remembered: she would give this article her full attention.

She began to read. Twenty minutes later she was still sitting with the manuscript before her, mulling over what she had read.

That is what she was doing when the telephone interrupted her.

It was Jamie.

“I’m sorry that I wasn’t in when you called.”

“You wanted to see me.”

“Yes, I do. I need to see you.”

She waited for him to say something more, but he did not.

So she continued: “It sounds important.”

“It isn’t really. Well, I suppose it’s important to me. I need to discuss something personal.” He paused. “I’ve met somebody, you see. I need to talk about that.”

She looked at the shelves of books. So many of them were F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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about duty, and obligation, and the sheer moral struggle of this life.

“That’s very good news,” she said. “I’m glad.”

“Glad?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. It was so easy to do the right thing, when the right thing involved just words; deeds might be more difficult. “I’m glad that you’ve met somebody. In fact, I think I saw her at the Queen’s Hall. She looked . . .” She paused. “Very nice.” The simple words were difficult.

“But she wasn’t there,” said Jamie.

Isabel frowned. “That girl in the interval . . .”

“Friend,” said Jamie.

C H A P T E R F I V E

E

SHE WAS THERE at the delicatessen the next morning a few minutes before Eddie arrived. One of the locks seemed stiff, and she had to struggle with it before it opened. Her fumblings triggered the alarm, and by the time she was inside, the first shrill braying of the klaxon could be heard. She rushed through to the office, where the system’s control panel was blinking in the half-light. She had committed the number to memory, but now, faced with the keypad and its array of numbers, only the mnemonic remained: the date of the fall of Constantinople. That was a date which she would never forget, of course, but now she did, remembering only Miss Macfarlane, the history teacher, in the black bombazine which she occasionally wore, perhaps out of deference to the headmistress, who wore nothing else, standing in front of the class of small girls in the room overlooking George Square and saying, A fatal year for the West, girls, a fatal year. We must not forget this date.

Isabel thought: We must not forget this date, girls, and it came back to her and promptly silenced the alarm. 1492. She felt relief, but then doubt, and confusion. Constantinople had fallen not in 1492, but in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed had F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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defeated the defenders. Remember, girls, that the Turk had more than one hundred thousand men, said Miss Macfarlane, and there were only ten thousand of us. Isabel had looked at Miss Macfarlane and wondered, but only for a moment. Miss Macfarlane was Scottish and yet she claimed affinity with the defenders of Constantinople. Us? And who was the Turk?

“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” she muttered,

“Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

“And something happened in a place called Constantinople,”

said a voice behind her. “That’s what Cat said. That’s how we’re meant to remember the number.”

Isabel spun round. Eddie had entered, quietly, and was standing behind her. His suddenly announced presence had given her a fright, but it had at least solved the mystery. Cat had given her the number, written it down on her list, and at the same time had given the mnemonic that she used. And Isabel dutifully had committed the wrong mnemonic to memory, not thinking to correct it.

“That’s how errors are made,” she said to Eddie.

“You fed in the wrong number?”

“No, but Constantinople did not fall in 1492. It fell in 1453.

The Turk had over one hundred thousand men and we had only . . .” She paused. Eddie was looking confused. Of course he might never have been taught any history, she thought. Would he know who Mary, Queen of Scots, was? Or James VI? She looked at him, at the quiet, rather frightened young man whose life, she realised, had been ruined by something traumatic and who had done nothing to deserve that.

“You’re going to have to be patient with me,” she said to him.

“I really don’t know what I’m doing. And setting the alarm off like that was not very clever of me.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He smiled at her, nervously, but still it was a smile. “It took me a long time to learn how to do this job,” he ventured. “I couldn’t remember the names of the cheeses for ages. Cheddar and Brie were all right—I knew those—but all those others, that took me ages.”

“Not your fault,” said Isabel. “I’m not bad on cheeses, and wines too, I suppose, but when it comes to spices, I always get them mixed up. Cardamom and all those things. I always forget the names.”

Eddie moved to switch on a light. The office had no outer window and the only light filtered in through the shop, past the coffee tables and the open-topped sacks of muesli and bas-mati rice.

“I usually start by getting the coffee going,” said Eddie. “We get a few people coming in for a coffee on the way to work.”

The delicatessen had three or four tables at which people could sit, purchase a cup of coffee, and read out-of-date Continental newspapers. There was always a copy of Le Monde and Corriere della Sera, and sometimes Spiegel, which Isabel found interesting because of its habit of publishing articles about the Second World War and German guilt. It was important to remember, and perhaps some Germans felt that they could never forget, but would there be a point at which those awful images of the past could be put away? Not if we want to avoid a repetition, said some, and the Germans took this very seriously, while others perhaps preferred to forget. The Germans deserved great credit for their moral seriousness, which is why Isabel liked them so much. Anyone—any people—was capable of doing what they did in their historical moment of madness—

and their goodness lay in the fact that they later faced up to F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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what they had done. Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine-tooth comb? She was not aware of it, if they did, and nobody seemed to mention the genocide of the Armenians—an atrocity which was virtually within living memory—except the Armenians, of course.

And the Belgians, she suddenly remembered, who had passed a resolution in their Senate only a few years previously noting what had happened in Armenia. Some had said that was all very well, but then what about what Leopold did in the Congo? And were there not islanders, somewhere in the Pacific, whose ancestors stood accused of eating—yes, eating the original inhabitants of the lands they occupied? Most unfortunate.

And then there were the British who behaved extremely badly in so many parts of the world. There was the woeful story of the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginals and so many other instances of cruelty and theft under the bright protection of the Union Jack. When would British history books face up to the appalling British contribution to slavery, which involved the Arabs, too, and numerous Africans (who were not just on the receiving end)? We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History, it seemed, could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination, an infinite regress of cruelty and oppression, unless forgetfulness or forgiveness intervened.

All of this was very interesting, but nothing to do with the running of a delicatessen. Isabel reminded herself of this and opened the safe with the code which Cat had noted down for her: 1915. The year that the Turks fell upon the Armenians, Isabel noted, though Cat could hardly have intended that. She 4 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had never heard Cat mention the Armenians—not once. Nineteen fifteen were the last four digits of Cat’s telephone number, an altogether more prosaic choice.

She heard Eddie tipping the coffee beans into the grinder and savoured the smell of the grounds. Then she busied herself with putting the float in the till, and checked that there was an adequate supply of plastic bags for the packing of purchases. Now we are ready, Isabel thought, with some satis-faction. Trading begins. She looked at Eddie, who gave her a thumbs-up signal of encouragement. We feel the common feeling of employees, she thought; that peculiar feeling of involvement with those with whom one works. It was not like friendship; it was a feeling of being together in something which afflicts all humans—work. We are working together, and hence there exist between us subtle bonds of loyalty and support. That is why trade unionists addressed one another as brother and sister. We are together in our bondage, each light-ening the load of another; somewhat extreme, she reflected, for a middle-class delicatessen in Edinburgh, but nonetheless something to think about.

T H E M O R N I N G WA S B U S Y, but everything went well. There was one rather difficult customer who brought in a bottle of wine—half consumed—and claimed that the wine was corked and should be replaced. Isabel knew that Cat’s policy was to replace or refund in such circumstances, and to do so without question, but when she sniffed at the neck of the offending bottle what she got was the odour of vinegar and not the characteristic mustiness of a corked wine. She poured a small amount of F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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the wine into a glass and sipped at it gingerly, glared at by the customer, a young man in a rainbow-coloured woolly hat.

“Vinegar,” she said. “This wine has been left opened. There’s been oxidation.”

She looked at the young man. The most likely explanation, in her view, was that he had drunk half the bottle and then left it open for a day or two. Any wine would turn to vinegar in warm weather like this. Now he thought that he could get a fresh bottle of wine without paying. He must have read about corked wine in a newspaper.

“It was corked,” he said.

“Then why is so much of it drunk?” asked Isabel, pointing to the level in the bottle.

“Because I poured a large glass,” he said. “Then, when I tasted it, I had to throw that out. I poured another glass just to be sure, but that was as bad.”

Isabel stared at him. She was sure that he was lying, but there was no point in persisting. “I’ll give you another bottle,”

she said, thinking: This is exactly how lies prevail. Liars get away with it.

“Chianti, please,” said the young man.

“This isn’t Chianti,” said Isabel. “This is an Australian Shi-raz. Our Chianti is more expensive than this.”

“But I’ve been inconvenienced,” said the young man. “It’s the least you can do.”

Isabel said nothing, but crossed to a shelf and took down a bottle of Chianti, which she handed to the young man.

“If you don’t finish it,” she said, “make sure you put the cork back in and keep it in a cool place. That should slow down oxidation.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“You don’t need to tell me that,” he said truculently.

“Of course not,” said Isabel.

“I know about these Spanish wines,” he went on.

Isabel said nothing, but caught Eddie’s glance and his suppressed look of mirth. It was going to be fun, she thought. Running a delicatessen was different from running the Review of Applied Ethics, but, in its own way, might be every bit as enjoyable.

B E I N G B U S Y, she had little time to think about the impending arrival of Jamie, who had agreed over the telephone to meet her for lunch at the neighbouring coffee bar and potted plant shop.

Eddie ate his lunch in the delicatessen and did not need time off, he said, and so she was able to slip out at one o’clock when Jamie arrived.

The coffee bar was uncrowded and they had no difficulty finding a couple of seats near the window.

“This is rather like eating in the jungle,” Isabel said, pointing to the palm fronds at her back.

“Without the bugs,” said Jamie, glancing at the palm and the large Monstera deliciosa behind it. Then: “I’m very glad you could see me. I didn’t want to discuss this over the telephone.”

“I don’t mind,” said Isabel. And she did not. It was good to see him, and now that he was here, in the flesh, her inappropriate feelings seemed a thing of the past, virtually forgotten. This was Jamie, who was just a friend, although he was a friend of whom she was very fond.

Jamie looked down, seeming to study the tablecloth. Isabel looked at his cheekbones, and at the en brosse hair. When he F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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looked up, she caught his gaze, and held it—eyes which were almost grey in that light; kind eyes, she thought, which was what made him so beautiful in her view.

“You’ve met somebody,” she prompted.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And I’m not sure what to do. I’m happy, I suppose, but I’m all mixed up. I thought that you being . . .”

“The editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, ” she supplied.

“And a friend,” Jamie went on. “Perhaps my closest friend.”

No woman likes to hear that from a man, thought Isabel.

Men may think about women in those terms, but it’s certainly not what most women want to hear. But she nodded briefly and Jamie continued: “The difficulty is that this person, this woman I’ve met, is not somebody I thought I would fall for. I hadn’t planned it. I really hadn’t.”

“Which is exactly what Cupid’s arrows are all about,” said Isabel gently. “Very inaccurate. They fly about all over the place.”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “But you usually have a general idea of what sort of person you’re going to go for. Somebody like Cat, for instance. And then somebody else comes along, and wham!”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Wham! That’s the way it happens, isn’t it? But why fight it? Just accept that it’s happened and make the most of it. Unless it’s impossible, that is. But that doesn’t happen much these days. Montague and Capulet difficulties.

Social barriers and all the rest. Even being the same sex is not a problem today.”

“She’s married,” Jamie blurted out, and then looked down at the tablecloth again.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel caught her breath.

“And she’s older than me,” said Jamie. “She’s about your age, actually.”

She had not been prepared for this and her dismay must have shown. Jamie frowned. “I knew that you would disapprove,” he said. “Of course you would disapprove.”

Isabel opened her mouth to say something, to deny the disapproval, but he cut her short. “I shouldn’t have bothered you with this. It would have been better not to tell you.”

“No,” she said. “I’m glad you told me.” She paused, gather-ing her thoughts. “It is a bit of a shock, I suppose. I hadn’t imagined . . .” She trailed off. What offended her was that it was a woman of her age. She had accepted that he would want somebody of his own age, or younger, but she had not prepared herself for competition from a coeval.

“I didn’t ask for it to happen,” Jamie went on, sounding quite miserable. “And now I don’t know what to do. I feel . . .

what do I feel? I feel, well I feel as if I’m doing something wrong.”

“Which you are,” said Isabel. Then she paused. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but . . . but don’t you think you’re doing something wrong if you’re participating in decep-tion, which adultery usually involves? Not always, but often.

There’s somebody whose trust is being abused. Promises are being broken.”

Jamie looked down at the tablecloth, tracing an imaginary pattern with a finger. “I’ve thought of all that,” he said. “But in this case the marriage is almost over. She says that although they’re still married, they lead separate lives.”

“But they’re still together?”

“In name.”

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“In house?”

Jamie hesitated. “Yes, but she says that they would prefer to live apart.”

Isabel looked at him. She reached out and touched him gently on the arm. “What do you want me to say, Jamie?” she asked. “Do you want me to tell you that it’s perfectly all right? Is that what you want?”

Jamie shook his head. “I don’t think so. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

The milky coffee which Isabel had ordered now arrived, and she picked up the large white cup in which it was served.

“That’s understandable,” she said. “But you should bear in mind that I can’t tell you what to do. You know the issues perfectly well. You’re not fifteen. You may want me to give you my blessing, to say that it’s perfectly acceptable, and that’s because you’re feeling guilty, and afraid.” She paused, remembering the line from WHA’s poem: Mortal, guilty, but to me/ The entirely beautiful. Yes, that spoke to this moment.

The misery had not left Jamie’s voice. “Yes, I do feel guilty.

And yes, I suppose I did want you to tell me that it was all right.”

“Well, I can’t do that,” said Isabel, gently. And she reached across and took his hand, and held it for a moment. “I can’t tell you any of that, can I?”

Jamie shook his head. “No.”

“So what can I say?”

“You could let me tell you about her,” said Jamie quietly. “I wanted to do that.”

Isabel understood now that he was in love. When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as 5 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope.

C H A P T E R S I X

E

THE NEXT DAY it was Eddie who opened the delicatessen.

By the time that Isabel arrived, he had already prepared the coffee and was pouring her a cup as she entered the shop.

“Everything’s ready,” he said, handing her the cup. “And I’ve spoken to the delivery people about coming this afternoon.

They can do it.”

“Such efficiency,” said Isabel, smiling at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “You don’t really need me, I think.”

Eddie’s face showed his alarm. “No,” he said. “I do.”

“I wasn’t entirely serious,” Isabel said quickly. She had noticed that Eddie was very literal, and it crossed her mind that he might have Asperger’s. These things came in degrees, and perhaps he suffered from a mild version of the condition. It would certainly explain the shyness; the withdrawal.

Isabel sat at Cat’s desk, her coffee before her. The morning’s mail, which had been retrieved by Eddie, contained nothing of note, other than an inexplicable bill for which payment was demanded within seven days. Isabel asked Eddie about it, but he shrugged. Then there was a letter from a supplier saying that a consignment of buffalo mozzarella had been delayed in Italy 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and would be delivered late. Eddie said that this did not matter, as they still had plenty.

Then the customers began to drift in. Isabel dispensed small tubs of olives and sun-dried tomatoes. She cut cheese and wrapped bread and reached for tins of mackerel fillets from the shelves. She exchanged views with customers—on the weather, on the contents of that day’s copy of the Scotsman, and, with questionable authority, on a local planning issue. So the morning drifted by, and not once, she reflected, had she had the opportunity to think about moral philosophy. This was cause for thought: most people led their lives this way—doing rather than thinking; they acted, rather than thought about acting. This made philosophy a luxury—the privilege of those who did not have to spend their time cutting cheese and wrapping bread. From the perspective of the cheese counter, Schopenhauer seemed far away.

If there was no time to think about the affairs of the Review of Applied Ethics, there was time enough to think about Jamie.

The entire previous evening, when Isabel had been catching up with Review work, she had found her mind wandering back to her conversation with Jamie. The news of his involvement with Louise—that being the only name he had revealed to her—had initially upset Isabel, and after a while she had found herself depressed by what he told her. There was nothing romantic in the situation, she felt, no matter how Jamie might wish to portray it. He was clearly infatuated, and Isabel doubted very much that Louise would reciprocate. Her picture of Louise was of a bored and rather hard woman, living with a husband who was probably unfaithful to her but staying with him because he provided material security. She would not leave her husband, and indeed Jamie might have been a way of her getting back at a F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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man who paid her little attention. It was exactly the strategy which some people urged on ignored wives: make him jealous.

And Jamie would be perfect for that—a younger man, handsome, and, as a musician, slightly exotic.

Isabel ate her lunch at one of the tables in the delicatessen.

While Eddie attended to the customers, she picked up a copy of Corriere della Sera and flicked through the news. Much of it was of the internecine battles of Italian politicians; the shifting of coalitions, the pursuit of narrow advantage, the accusations by liars of lying by others. There was a statement from the Pope about the importance of papal statements.

Isabel looked up from her paper and reached for her sand-wich. A man was standing at the table, a plate in his hand, gesturing at the vacant seat.

“Would you mind?”

Isabel noticed that while she had been reading the other tables had filled up. She smiled at the man. “Not at all. In fact, I shouldn’t be sitting here much longer. I’m staff, you see.”

The man sat down, placing the plate in front of him. “I’m sure that you need a break, just as everyone does.”

Isabel smiled. “It’s not as if I’m real staff,” she said. “I’m standing in for my niece.” She looked at his plate, which had on it a small portion of tomato salad, a few hazelnuts, and a sardine.

He was on a diet, and yet there seemed to be no need. He was a man in his mid-fifties, she thought, not at all overweight—the opposite, in fact. She noticed, too, that he had that look about him which her housekeeper Grace described as distinguished, but which she herself would have described as intelligent.

He noticed Isabel’s glance at his plate. “Not very much,” he said ruefully. “But needs must.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Looking after your heart?” Isabel asked.

The man nodded. “Yes.” He paused, moving the sardine to the centre of the salad. “It’s my second.”

“Sardine?” she asked, and then immediately realised what he meant.

She felt herself blush, and began to explain, but he raised a hand. “Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. I’ve had a heart transplant, and I have fairly strict instructions from my doctors. Salads, sardines, and so on.”

“Which can be made to taste perfectly nice,” she said, rather weakly, she thought.

“I don’t complain about this new diet of mine,” said the man. “I feel much better. I don’t feel hungry, and”—he paused, touching the front of his jacket, at the chest—“and this, this heart— my heart I should call it now—seems to thrive on it, and on the immunosuppressants.”

Isabel smiled. She was intrigued. “But it is your heart,” she said. “Or now it is. A gift.”

“But it’s also his heart,” he said. “And at least I know that it was a he. If it had been a woman, then that would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it? Then I’d be a man with the heart of a woman. Which would make me very much of a new man, wouldn’t you say?”

“Perhaps,” said Isabel. “But I’m interested in what you said about it being his heart. Things that we own remain ours, don’t they, even when we pass them on. I saw somebody driving my old car the other day, and I thought, That woman’s driving my car. Perhaps there are echoes of ownership that persist well after we lose possession.”

The man lifted his knife and fork to begin his meal. Noticing this, Isabel said: “I’m sorry. You have your lunch to eat. I should stop thinking aloud.”

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He laughed. “No, please go on. I enjoy a conversation which goes beyond the superficial. Most of the time we exchange banalities with other people. And here you are launching into linguistics, or should I say philosophical speculation. All over a plate of salad and a sardine. I like that.” He paused. “After my experience—my brush with death—I find that I have rather less time for small talk.”

“That’s quite understandable,” said Isabel, glancing at her watch. There was a small line of customers building up at the cash desk and Eddie had looked over at her table, as if to ask for help.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I have to get back to work.”

The man smiled at her. “You said you don’t really work here,” he said. “May I ask: what is it you do normally?”

“Philosophy,” said Isabel, rising to her feet.

“Good,” said the man. “That’s very good.”

He seemed disappointed that she was leaving the table, and Isabel was disappointed to go. There was more to be said, she thought, about hearts and what they mean to us. She wanted to know how it felt to have an alien organ beating away within one’s chest; this bit of life extracted from another, and still living. And how did the relatives of the donor feel, knowing that part of their person (Isabel refused to use the expression loved one, because it was so redolent of the world of its original coin-ers, American undertakers) was still alive? Perhaps this man—

whoever he was—knew about this and could tell her. But in the meantime, there was cheese to be cut and sun-dried tomatoes to measure out; matters of greater immediate importance than questions of the heart and what they meant.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h S H E WO U L D H AV E L I K E D to do nothing that evening, but could not. It had been a demanding day, with many more customers than usual, and she and Eddie had been kept busy until almost seven o’clock. Now, back at the house, the sight of her unopened mail, neatly stacked on her desk by Grace and containing several very obvious manuscripts, dispirited her. What she would have liked to do was to have a light dinner in the garden room, and follow that with a walk in the garden, with a glimpse, perhaps, of Brother Fox, her name for the urban fox who lived part of his cautious, hidden life there, and then a long, warm bath. But this was impossible, as the mail would stack up and it would begin to haunt her, reproaching her every time she entered her study. So she had no alternative but to work, and had resolved to do so when the telephone rang and Jamie announced that he and Louise would be passing by on their way to Balerno (not en route, Isabel thought, but did not say), and would she mind if they called in for a quick cup of something. Isabel wanted to say yes she would mind, but even with the pile of mail in view she said no, she would not mind.

This made her think of akrasia, weakness of the will, by which we do that which we really want to do in the full knowledge that we should be doing something else. But why should she want to see Jamie and Louise? Curiosity, she assumed.

After the telephone call she could settle to nothing. She was no longer interested in dinner, and although she tried to deal with the mail, she could not concentrate on that and gave up. There were already more than twenty outstanding items; tomorrow there would be five or six more—sometimes it was many more than that—and so on. But even the thought of F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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the numbers (over a hundred and fifty letters in one month, three hundred in two) failed to motivate her, and she ended up sitting in the drawing room at the front of the house, paging through a magazine, waiting for Jamie to arrive. They were going to Balerno, were they? Balerno was a suburb in the west of Edinburgh, a place of well-set suburban homes, each planted squarely in a patch of garden, and each staring out on the world with windows that looked to all intents and purposes like two rectangular eyes. Balerno was somnolent, a respectable place in which nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Then she remembered something else which had been said to her by somebody a long time ago, perhaps when she was a schoolgirl or a very young woman. Somebody had said—or whispered, perhaps—that the suburbs of Edinburgh had a reputation for adultery, and that Balerno was a great place for that. Yes, somebody had said that and sniggered, as a schoolgirl might snigger; and of course it was easy to imagine. If you were tucked up in a suburb, then might you not feel the need to take some risks? And that would lead to the adventure of adultery committed after parties in insurance offices in town, on company training weekends in Perthshire hotels; snatched moments of excitement, lived out against the emptiness of a predictable life.

Jamie had been drawn into that world, and that was why he was going to Balerno. The thought made Isabel grimace. There was no romance there; only tawdry shame. And poor Jamie had been entrapped by this Louise person, this older woman, who probably cared nothing for his music or for his moral qualities, and for whom he was something to toy with.

One might work oneself up into a state of anger just thinking about Louise, and what she stood for. But Isabel would not allow this to happen; it was always a mistake, she thought, to 5 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dwell on the cause of one’s anger, like Tam O’Shanter’s wife, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm, as Burns put it. No, thought Isabel, I must like Louise, because that is my duty; not because one has a moral duty to like people in general—an impossibility for those short of sainthood—but because I know that Jamie will be hoping that I should like her.

She was thinking of friendship and its duties when the bell rang. When she opened the door, she saw immediately from Jamie’s expression that she had been right about how he would feel: there was a strange look on his face, one in which anticipation was mixed with concern. She wanted to lean forward and whisper to him, Don’t worry. Don’t worry. But could not, of course, because standing behind him was Louise, who seemed to be looking up at the evening sky.

She invited them in and the introductions took place in the hall. Jamie did not give Louise’s other name, an endemic social failing which Isabel had stopped remarking upon; so many people now gave only their first names. In this case, though, there might be a reason. Was Louise openly in Jamie’s company, or was discretion still required?

Isabel looked at Louise and smiled. She saw more or less what she had expected to see—a woman in her late thirties, of average height, wearing a longish red skirt and a soft padded green jacket of the sort which became perversely fashionable in the West in the days of Madame Mao—peasant chic. The skirt and the jacket were expensive, though, and overall there was a feel to this woman, Isabel thought, which suggested that she was accustomed to wealth and comfort. Material security brought a particular form of self-assurance—an easy confidence that things would simply be there if one wanted them, and this F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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woman had that assurance. The wealthy, thought Isabel, fit in.

They are never out of place.

And as for the face—high cheekbones and wide, dark eyes—it was a face which she had seen used in the faux nativities which artists painted when they tried to capture the spirit of Renaissance Italy. It was inarguably a beautiful face, and it could beguile any man, even a young man, thought Isabel. This was not a charitable thought, and she reminded herself to smile as she shook hands with Louise, who looked back at her, smiling too, and undoubtedly performing her own calculations as to who Isabel was and what she meant to Jamie. Was she a threat?

Well, Isabel was attractive too, but she was a philosopher, was she not, buried in her books, a bit above all that sort of thing (young men, affairs, and the rest).

They went into the drawing room and Isabel offered them white wine. Jamie said he would pour it, and Isabel noticed that Louise had picked up this sign of familiarity. Isabel found herself pleased at this: it would do her no harm to know that she and Jamie had been friends for years.

“Your health,” said Isabel, raising her glass to Jamie first and then to Louise. They sat down, Louise choosing the sofa, where she patted a cushion beside her, discreetly, almost as one would give a secret signal, for Jamie to sit beside her, which he did.

Isabel sat opposite them and looked at Jamie. Nothing was said, but Louise noticed the exchange of glances and frowned, almost imperceptibly, which was noticed by Isabel.

“I have to go out to Balerno to look at a bassoon,” said Jamie.

“One of my pupils lives out there, and he has been offered an instrument which he can’t bring into town. I’m going to tell him if it’s worth buying. It’s a bit complicated.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel nodded. Jamie was always looking at bassoons. “I thought perhaps Louise lived out there.”

Louise looked up sharply. “Balerno?”

Isabel smiled disarmingly. “My mistake,” she said. “Do you live in town?”

Louise nodded, and although Isabel waited for her to say something else, no further information was forthcoming.

“Louise has a job with the National Gallery,” Jamie said.

“Part-time, but quite interesting, isn’t it, Louise?”

“Most of the time,” said Louise.

“Well, you get around with it,” said Jamie. “Didn’t you have to accompany a painting to Venice the other day? Sitting on the seat beside you, in its little crate?”

“Yes,” said Louise. “I did.”

Jamie looked nervously at Isabel, who said, “I suppose you can’t put paintings in the hold when you’re lending them for an exhibition.”

“We can’t,” said Louise. “The small ones travel with us in the plane. They get tickets.”

“But no meal,” said Jamie, weakly.

For a few moments there was silence. Isabel took a sip of her wine. She wanted to say to Louise, And what does your husband do? It was a delicious thought, because it was such a subversive, tactless thing to ask in the circumstances—to bring up the husband, the ghost at this banquet. She could ask the question disingenuously, as if she had no idea of the nature of the relationship between Jamie and this woman, but of course Jamie would know that she had asked it mischievously, and would be mortified. But then he could hardly complain if he brought her here, to flaunt her. Could he not understand that F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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this whole meeting would be painful for her? Was it too much to expect that he should sense her unhappiness over all this?

Isabel raised her wineglass and took another sip. Opposite her, Louise had begun to fiddle with a button on her jacket.

This, thought Isabel, is because she is uncomfortable. She does not want to be here. She has no interest in me. In her eyes she is the adventuress, the passionate one, fashionable, a woman who can get a young man so very easily while this other woman, this philosopher woman, has nothing. She watched her, and she saw the eyes go to the mantelpiece and to the pictures with a look on her face that was utterly dismissive, though she had no idea that Isabel would see it. I am nothing to her, she told herself; I am beneath her notice. Well, in that case . . .

“What does your husband do?” asked Isabel.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

E

SHE HAD DECIDED to apologise, of course, at least to Jamie, but the next day she had neither the time to feel guilty nor to make the telephone call that would assuage her guilt. Shortly after she arrived in the morning to open up, a consignment of cheeses was delivered from a cheesemaker in Lanarkshire, and they had to be unwrapped by hand, priced, and put on display.

Isabel did this while Eddie prepared the coffee, and then there was a spate of talkative customers who took up her time with long-drawn-out conversations. There was an elderly customer who thought that Isabel was Cat, and addressed her accordingly, and a shoplifter whom she saw eating a bar of chocolate, unpaid for, while he stuffed a can of artichoke hearts into a pocket. At least we have discerning thieves, she thought, as she watched him run down the street; artichoke hearts and Belgian chocolate.

At one o’clock she signalled to Eddie that he should take over at the till while she took a break. Then she helped herself to a bagel and several slices of smoked salmon before moving over to the table area. The tables were busy, with all the chairs taken, except for one, where her lunching companion of the previous day sat, a frugal tub of salad before him, reading a F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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newspaper. He had not seen her, and she hesitated. She was not sure if she wanted to sit at his table uninvited, and was about to go back to the office, to eat her lunch amongst the calendars and the catalogues, when he looked up and smiled at her, gesturing to the unoccupied chair.

He put the newspaper to the side. “You’re busy.”

She looked about her. “I prefer it that way. I find that I quite like being busy.”

“I used to,” he said. “I used to be busy and now I mark time, reading the papers, doing the shopping for my wife.”

She had not anticipated the reference to a wife; men who sat by themselves in delicatessens were likely to be single.

“She works?”

“Like me, a psychologist. Or at least, I used to be a psychologist. I gave it up just before the operation.”

Isabel nodded. “A good idea, I suppose, if one has been very ill. There’s no point—”

“In hastening one’s appointment at Mortonhall Cremato-rium,” he interjected. “No, I stopped, and found that I didn’t miss it in the least.”

Isabel broke her bagel in two and took a bite out of one of the pieces.

“I still read the professional journals,” he said, watching her eat. “It makes me feel that I’m on top of the subject, not that there is anything completely new and suprising to be said in psychology. I’m not at all sure that our understanding of human behaviour has progressed a great deal since Freud—awful admission though that is.”

“Surely we know a bit more. What about cognitive science?”

He raised an eyebrow. Her reference to cognitive science 6 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was clearly not what he expected of a woman working in a delicatessen, but then he remembered that she was a philosopher.

Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef really what you want?

He picked at a lettuce leaf. “Cognitive science has helped,”

he said. “Yes, of course, we know much more about how the brain works and how we see the world. But behaviour is rather more than that. Behaviour is tied up with personality and how our personalities make us do what we do. That stuff is all very messy and not just a simple matter of neural pathways and the rest.”

“And then there’s genetics,” said Isabel, taking another bite of her bagel. “I thought that behavioural genetics might explain a great deal of what we do. What about all those twin studies?”

“My name’s Ian, by the way,” he said, and she said: Isabel Dalhousie, with an emphasis on the Dalhousie. “Yes, those twin studies. Very interesting.”

“But don’t they prove that whatever the environmental influences, people behave as they do because of heredity?”

“They do not,” Ian said. “All that they show is that there is a genetic factor in behaviour. But it’s not the only factor.”

Isabel was not convinced. “But I read somewhere or other about these pairs of separated twins that keep turning up in America. And when they look at them they discover that they like the same colours and vote the same way and say the same sort of thing to the researchers.”

Ian laughed. “Oh yes, it’s wonderful stuff. I’ve read some of the papers from Minnesota. In one of them they found that twins who had been separated at birth had actually both mar-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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ried women of the same name, divorced them at roughly the same time, and then remarried. And the second wives of each man had the same name. Two Bettys or whatever to begin with, and then two Joans.” He paused. “But then, Middle America’s full of Bettys and Joans.”

“Even so, the odds are very much against it,” said Isabel.

“Two Bettys is not too unlikely, but then to pick two Joans. I’m no statistician, but I should imagine that would be astronomi-cally unlikely.”

“But the unlikely can happen, you know,” said Ian. “And that, of course, can change everything we believe in. Single white crow, you see.”

Isabel looked at him blankly, and he continued: “That’s something said by William James. The finding of a single white crow would disprove the theory that all crows are black. It’s quite a pithy way of making the point that it won’t take much to disprove something which we take as absolutely firmly established.”

“Such as the proposition about black crows.”

“Precisely.”

Isabel glanced at Ian. He was looking away from her, out through the window of the shop. Outside, in the street, a bus had stopped to disgorge a couple of passengers: a middle-aged woman in a coat which looked too warm for the day, and a young woman in a T-shirt with a legend bleached out in the wash.

“You’re looking worried,” she said. “Are you all right?”

He turned back to face her. “I came across that quote from William James in an article recently,” he said. “Something rather close to home.”

She waited for him to continue. He had picked up his newspaper and folded it again, running a finger down the crease. “It was used as an introduction to an article about the psychologi-6 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cal implications of transplant surgery, a subject obviously of some interest to me.”

Isabel felt that she should encourage him. “Well, I can imagine that these are major. It must be a massive disturbance for the system. All surgery is to some degree.”

“Yes, of course it is. But this article was about something very specific. It was about cellular memory.”

She waited for him to explain, but instead he looked at his watch. “Look,” he said, “I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to dash. I agreed to meet my wife ten minutes ago, and she has to get back to her office. I can’t keep her.”

“Of course,” said Isabel. “You’d better go.”

Ian rose to his feet, picking up his newspaper and the empty salad tub. “Could I speak to you about this? Could I discuss it with you later? Would you mind?”

There was something in his tone which spoke of vulnerability, and Isabel thought that she could not refuse his request, even if she had wanted to. But, in fact, her curiosity had been aroused; curiosity, her personal weakness, the very quality which had led her into such frequent interventions in the lives of others and which she simply could not resist. And so she said: “Yes, by all means.” And she scribbled her telephone number on the top of his newspaper and invited him to call her and arrange a time to come round to the house for a glass of wine, if his regime allowed for that.

“It does,” he said. “A minuscule glass of wine, almost invisible to the naked eye.”

“The sort they serve in Aberdeen,” said Isabel.

“Very appropriate,” he said, smiling. “I’m from Aberdeen.”

“I’m sorry,” said Isabel hurriedly. “I’ve always found Aberdo-nians very generous.”

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“Perhaps we are,” he said, adding, “in a frugal sort of way.

No, wine is all right, in small quantities. But I have to avoid chocolate apparently. And that’s very hard. Even the thought of chocolate is difficult for me. It sets up such a yearning.”

Isabel agreed with this. “Chocolate involves major philosophical problems,” she said. “It shows us a lot about temptation and self-control.” She thought for a moment. There was a lot that one might say about chocolate, if one thought about it.

“Yes,” she concluded, “chocolate is a great test, isn’t it?”

T H E A F T E R N OO N PA S S E D as the morning had, in a flurry of business. Again Isabel was tired by the time she locked the front door and drew down the shutters. Eddie had left a few minutes early for some reason—he had mumbled an explanation which Isabel had not quite caught—and Isabel had shut everything up herself. She glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock, and she had still to call Jamie. But she thought that if she did so now, then there would be a chance that Louise might be there and it would be difficult for him to talk, if he wanted to talk to her, of course. The previous evening had been a social disaster. After Isabel had brought up the issue of the husband, with her inex-cusably mischievous question, Louise had become more or less silent, and had not responded to the question. The tactic had worked, though, Isabel realised, and although Louise persisted with her air of studied boredom, it was obvious that she had a new understanding of her hostess. Jamie had been flustered and had gulped down his wine before suggesting that it was time that they went on to Balerno. The farewells at the front door had been perfunctory.

Isabel had almost immediately regretted her rudeness, for it 6 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was simple rudeness to embarrass a guest, no matter what provo-cation the guest had offered. It had been a petty action, and not one from which she was likely to benefit. The bonds of friendship might appear strong, but she understood that there was nothing easier to break than friendship, with all its expectations.

One might ignore a friend, or let him down, but you could not do something deliberate to hurt him.

An apology could not be put off. Isabel remembered her father making this point when he considered Japan’s apology to China for what it did in Manchuria. Forty years is slightly late, he had observed, adding, but I suppose one doesn’t want to rush these things.

“Jamie?”

There was a slight hesitation at the other end of the line, which is always a sign of resentment. This was the So it’s you pause.

“Yes.”

She took a deep breath. “You can guess why I’m calling.”

Another moment of silence. Of course he could guess.

“No,” he said.

“About last night, and my bad behaviour. All I can say is that I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Jealousy, maybe.”

He came in quickly. “Why should you be jealous?”

He doesn’t know, she thought. He has no idea. And this should not surprise her.

“I value your friendship, you see,” she said. “One can see other people as a threat to a friendship, and I thought . . . well, I’m afraid I thought that Louise was not in the slightest bit interested in me and that she would cut me out of your life. Yes, I suppose that’s what I felt. Do you think you can understand that?”

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She paused, and she heard Jamie’s breathing. Now there was silence, each uncertain whose turn it was to speak.

“Nobody is going to cut anybody out,” Jamie began. “Anyway, things did not go well last night. It had nothing to do with you. We had an argument even before we came to see you. Then things got worse, and I’m afraid that’s more or less it.”

Isabel looked up at the ceiling. She had not dared to hope for this, but it was exactly what she had wished for, subcon-sciously perhaps, and it had occurred much sooner than she would have thought possible. People fell in and out of love rather quickly, of course; it could happen within minutes.

“What a pity,” whispered Isabel. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not,” said Jamie sharply.

“No,” said Isabel. “I’m not.” She paused. “You’ll find some -

body else. There are plenty of girls.”

“I don’t want plenty of girls,” Jamie retorted. “I want Cat.”

C H A P T E R E I G H T

E

AND SALVATORE?” asked Isabel. “Tell me all about Salvatore.”

“Charming,” said Cat, meeting Isabel’s eye. “Exactly as I told you he was.”

They were sitting in the gazebo in Isabel’s back garden that Sunday afternoon, shortly after Cat’s return from Italy. It was an unusually warm day for Edinburgh, where summer is unpredictable and where the occasional warm day is something to be savoured. Isabel was used to this, and although she bemoaned, as everybody did, the tendency of the sky to disappear behind sheets of fast-moving cloud, she found a temperate climate more to her taste than a Mediterranean one. Weather was a test of attitude, she felt: had Auden not pointed that out? Nice people, he observed, were nice about the weather; nasty people were nasty about it.

Cat was a heliophile, if there was such a word for a sun-worshipper, she thought. Italy in the summer must have suited her perfectly; a climate of short shadows and dry breezes. Cat liked beaches and warm seas, while Isabel found such things F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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dull. She could think of nothing worse than sitting for hours under an umbrella, an open invitation to sandflies, looking out to sea. She wondered why it was that people did not talk on beaches; they sat, they lay prone, they read, but did they engage in conversation? Isabel thought not.

She remembered, years before, at the end of her spell at Georgetown, a visit she had paid to the Bahamas with her mother’s sister, the one who lived in Palm Beach. This aunt had bought, almost on impulse, an apartment in Nassau, to which she travelled once or twice a year. She had made there a group of bridge-playing friends, bored and unhappy tax exiles, and Isabel had met these people at drinks parties. They had little to say, and there was little to be said about them. And on one occasion, visiting the house of one of these bridge couples, she had been seized with a sudden existential horror. The house had white carpets and white furniture and, most significantly, no books. And they sat on the terrace, which was just above a small private beach, and looked out towards the ocean, and nothing was said, because nobody could think of anything to speak about.

“Beaches,” said Isabel to Cat.

“Beaches?”

“I was thinking about Italy, and the weather, and beaches came into my mind.” She looked at Cat. “And I suddenly remembered going to the Bahamas and meeting some people who lived on a beach.”

“Beach people?”

Isabel laughed. “Not in that sense. Not people who had a tent or whatever and let their hair get full of salt and all the rest.

No, these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble 7 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import, and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one.

“He had lived in England and had left the country because he couldn’t bear to pay taxes to a socialist government, or to any government, I suspect. And there they were on their Caribbean island, sitting on their terrace, with their heads full of nothing very much.

“They had a daughter, who was a young teenager when I saw her. She was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. So they withdrew her from her expensive school in England and brought her back to the island. She took up with a local boy whom the parents wouldn’t let into the house, with its white carpets and all the rest. They tried to stop her, but they couldn’t. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either. But they didn’t want their daughter’s baby, and I later heard that they just pretended that the baby didn’t exist.

It crawled around on the white carpets, but they didn’t really see it.”

Cat looked at Isabel. She was used to her relative’s musings, but this one surprised her. Usually Isabel’s stories had a clear moral point, but she was not sure what the moral point of this one was. Emptiness, perhaps; or the need for a purpose in life; or the immorality of tax havens. Or even babies and white carpets.

“Salvatore was quite charming,” said Cat. “He took us all out for a meal at a restaurant in the hills. It was one of the places where they give you very little choice but just bring course after course.”

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“They’re generous people, the Italians,” Isabel remarked.

“And his father was very kind, too,” went on Cat. “We went to their house and met all the relatives. Aunts, uncles, and so on. Crowds of them.”

“I see,” said Isabel. There was still the question of Salvatore’s father’s occupation. “And did you find out what the family business was?”

“I asked,” said Cat. “I asked one of the uncles. We were sitting under the pergola in the garden, having lunch—a large table with about twenty people at it. I asked Salvatore’s uncle.”

“And?” She imagined the uncle saying that he was not sure what his brother did; or that he had forgotten. One could not forget such a thing, just as one could not forget one’s address, as a Russian once claimed to Isabel when she asked him where he lived. He was frightened, poor man; those were times when one might not want one’s address in a foreigner’s address book, but it might have been better for him to say so, rather than to claim that he had forgotten it.

“He said it was shoes.”

Isabel was silent. Shoes. Italian shoes: elegant, beautifully designed, but always, always too small for Isabel’s feet. My Scottish-American feet, she thought, so much larger than Italian feet.

Cat smiled at her; she had dispelled the suspicions which her aunt had expressed over Salvatore’s family business. Perhaps it had been embarrassment over shoes, which were, after all, somewhat prosaic items.

“And what else did you do?” asked Isabel at last. “Apart from these lunch parties with Salvatore and the Salvatore family. Turismo? ”

7 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“We went to see Etna.”

“On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking,” said Isabel.

“Lawrence wrote that in his curious snake poem. You know the one, where a snake comes to his water trough, and he’s in his pyjamas for the heat, and he throws a rock at the snake. Auden never threw rocks at snakes, and that’s the crucial difference, isn’t it: writers who would throw rocks at snakes and those who wouldn’t. Hemingway would, wouldn’t he?” She smiled at Cat, who was shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, and looking at her with what Isabel always described as her patient look.

“I digress. I know,” Isabel went on. “But I always think of Etna smoking. And of Lawrence in his pyjamas.”

Cat took control of the conversation. Isabel could talk for hours about anything, unless stopped. “That was with a cousin of Salvatore’s, Tomasso. He’s from Palermo. They live in a large Baroque palazzo. He’s fun. He took me to all sorts of places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”

Isabel sat quite still. When Cat talked like this, about men being fun, it meant that she was interested in them, as she had been interested in Toby, with his crushed-strawberry trousers and his tedious skiing talk; as she had been interested in Geoff, the army officer who drank too much at parties and engaged in childish pranks, such as gluing people’s hats to the hatstand; as she had been interested in Henry, and David, and perhaps others.

“Tomasso’s a rally driver,” said Cat. “He drives an old Bugatti. It’s a beautiful car—red and silver.”

Isabel was noncommittal. At least Tomasso was at a safe distance . . .

“And he’s bringing the car over to Scotland soon,” said Cat.

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“It’s being brought over by train and ferry. He wants to drive it around the Highlands and see a bit of Edinburgh. He thought he might stay in Edinburgh for a few weeks.”

“When?” asked Isabel. There was resignation in her voice.

“Next week, I think,” said Cat. “Or the week after that. He’s going to call me and let me know.”

There was little more to be said on the subject. As they talked about the delicatessen and about what had happened there over the week, Isabel’s thoughts returned to one of the central issues of her moral life. She had determined long ago not to interfere in Cat’s affairs, no matter what the temptation to do so was. It was very easy to see what was best for one’s family, particularly when one did not have many relatives, but she understood how this offended the principle of autonomy, which holds, so stubbornly, that we must each be left to live our own lives as we see fit. This did not mean that we could do anything we liked—far from it—but it did mean that we had to make our own decisions as to what to do. And if this meant that we made bad choices, then we would have to be left with the making of those choices. Cat saw her destiny in men who would make her unhappy, precisely because they were inconstant, and selfish, and narcissistic. That was what she wanted to do, and she had to be allowed to do it.

“You’re fond of him?” Isabel asked quietly, and Cat, knowing what the question was about, was guarded in her response. Perhaps she was fond of him. She would see.

Isabel said nothing. She wondered for a moment what Tomasso would be like. Of course, if one bore in mind that he drove an old Bugatti and lived in a Baroque palazzo, then the answer was clear. He would be stylish, raffish no doubt, and 7 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he would make Cat unhappy, as she had been unhappy with the other men. And Jamie would be unhappy too, and would spend hours anxiously imagining Cat and Tomasso together, in the silver and red Bugatti, somewhere in Fife or Perthshire, on narrow, exhilarating roads.

C H A P T E R N I N E

E

SHE HAD SUGGESTED to Ian that they meet at her house, but when he telephoned her it was with a counter-invitation.

He would like to take her to lunch, if he might, at the Scottish Arts Club in Rutland Square.

“They do mackerel fillets for me,” he said. “Mackerel fillets and lettuce. But you can have something more substantial.”

Isabel knew the Arts Club. She had friends who were members and she knew the club president, a dapper antiques dealer with an exquisitely pointed moustache. She had even thought of joining, but done nothing about it, and so her visits to the club were restricted to the occasional lunch and the annual Burns Supper. The Burns Supper, which took place on or about the anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth, was of variable quality. In a year when there was a good speaker, the address to the Immortal Memory could be moving. But the occasion could rapidly drift into maudlin reflections on the ploughman poet and his carousing in Ayrshire, nothing of which Scotland could be proud, she thought. There was nothing edifying in the profound consumption of whisky, she felt. Every Scottish poet, it seemed, had drunk too much, or written about drink, or written 7 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h nonsense while under its influence. How much had been lost as a result—great screeds of unwritten poetry, whole decades of literature; lives unsung, hopes unrealised. And the same could be said of Scottish composers, or at least some of them—the sixth Earl of Kellie, for example, who had composed such fine fiddle music but who had often been drunk and who, it was said, laughed so much at his own jokes that he would turn purple.

That, of course, was a marvellous social detail; one could forgive a great deal in a man who turned purple in such circumstances.

One might even love such a figure.

Not that she laid the blame at the door of the Arts Club, before which she now stood, awaiting admission by one of the staff. Members had their own keys, but guests must wait until a member arrived or the secretary heard the bell. Isabel pressed the bell again and then looked back, over her shoulder, at the Rutland Square Gardens. Rutland Square was one of the finest squares in Georgian Edinburgh, tucked away at the west end of Princes Street, behind the great red sandstone edifice of the Caledonian Hotel. The gardens in the centre were not large, but had a number of well-established trees, which shaded the stone of the surrounding buildings. In spring the grass was covered with a riot of crocuses, impossible purples and yellows, and in summer, at lunchtime, it was lain upon during brief moments of sun by people from the nearby offices, pale secretaries and clerks in their shirtsleeves, just as Isabel and her friends at the Ladies’ College in George Square had stretched out on the grass and watched the students from the university, the boys in particular, and waited for their real lives to start.

Every part of Edinburgh had memories for Isabel, as any resident of any city remembers the places where things happened, the corners where there had been a coffee bar a long F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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time ago, or the building in which she had had her first job, the scene of an assignation, a disappointment or triumph. While she waited for the door to be opened, Isabel looked across the square to the corner where her friend Duncan had lived in his bachelor days. Behind an unassuming, black door was a common stone stair, winding and well-trodden over the years, that led up to four separate flats, one of them Duncan’s. And what parties had been conducted under that roof: parties that only started when everything else had finished; evenings of long conversations, one of which she remembered had ended with the arrival of the fire brigade when a spark from a log in the fireplace had started a smouldering fire in the floorboards—not anybody’s fault, as the firemen had pointed out as they stood in the kitchen later on and accepted a glass of whisky, and then another, and one after that, and had ended up singing with Duncan and his guests: My brother Bill’s a fireman bold /He pits oot fires. At the end, when the six firemen had made their way down the stair, one had remarked that it was a fine class of fire that one attended in Rutland Square, which was undoubtedly true. And another, the one who had proposed to Isabel in the kitchen, only to withdraw the offer ten minutes later on the grounds that he thought that he might already be married, had waved at her as he disappeared downstairs and doffed his fire helmet.

The door was opened. Inside the club, Isabel made her way upstairs to the large L-shaped sitting room—the smoking room—where members congregated. It was a room filled with light, with two large ceiling-to-floor windows at the front, overlooking the square and its trees, and another large window at the back, looking down onto the mews behind Shandwick Place. There were two fireplaces, a grand piano, and comfortable red leather bench seats running along one wall, like the 8 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h seats of an old parliament somewhere, in some forgotten corner of the Commonwealth.

The Arts Club usually had an exhibition of paintings hanging in the smoking room, sometimes by members, many of whom were artists. This exhibition was by a member, and Isabel picked up the explanatory sheet and examined the works. They were a mixture of small portraits and watercolours of domestic scenes. She recognised the subjects of a number of the portraits, and was impressed by the likenesses: Lord Prosser, a bril-liant, good man standing against a background of the Pentland Hills; Richard Demarco in an empty theatre, smiling optimistically. And then there was another one, a large picture that domi-nated the wall behind the piano, a portrayal of pride, an actor whom Isabel knew very slightly but who was well known in general, standing with a self-satisfied sneer on his face, a curl of the lip, pure arrogance. Did he recognise himself in the likeness, she wondered, or did he not see himself as others saw him?

Burns had said that, of course, and it had been repeated at the last but one Burns Supper downstairs, in a bucolic address given by a former moderator of the Church of Scotland: the gift to gie us/to see ourselves as ithers see us.

“Yes,” said a voice at her shoulder. “That’s him, isn’t it? She’s really summed him up, hasn’t she? Look at the eyebrows.”

Isabel turned round to see Ian standing behind her.

“One might have to keep one’s voice down,” said Isabel. “He could be a member here.”

“Not grand enough for him,” said Ian. “The New Club is more his territory.”

Isabel smiled. “Look at this portrait here,” she said, pointing to another of the pictures. A man sat in his study, one hand on a F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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pile of books and the other resting on a blotter. Behind him was a window in which a steep hillside of rhododendrons was visible.

“That’s a very different person altogether,” said Ian. “I know that man.”

“As it happens,” said Isabel, “so do I.”

They looked at the picture together. Isabel leant forward to examine the painting more closely. “Isn’t it extraordinary how experience writes itself on the face?” she said. “Experience and attitude—they both reveal themselves in the physical. One can understand people turning leathery, as Australians sometimes do, and one can understand how the pleasures of the table lead to fleshy jowls, but what is it that makes the spiritual face so different from the face of the venal? Especially with the eyes—how can the eyes be so different?”

“It’s how we read the face,” said Ian. “Remember that you’re talking to a psychologist. We like to think about things like that.

It’s a question of numerous little signals that create the overall impression.”

“But how do internal states show themselves physically?”

“Very easily,” said Ian. “Think of anger. The knitted brow.

Think of determination. The gritted teeth.”

“And intelligence?” asked Isabel. “What’s the difference between an intelligent face and an unintelligent one? And don’t tell me that there isn’t a difference—there is.”

“Liveliness and engagement with the world,” said Ian. “The vacuous face shows neither of these.”

Isabel gazed at the painting of the good, and then looked at the painting of the proud. In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not any more. The proud man could be proud with impunity, 8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.

They went down to lunch, choosing one of the few private tables at the rear of the dining room. The main tables, both round, were filling up. One was presided over by a Scotsman journalist who held court in the club three days a week; at the other table a gaggle of lawyers sat, chuckling over some misfortune.

“It was good of you to accept my invitation,” said Ian, as he poured Isabel a glass of water. “After all, I was a perfect stranger when we bumped into one another the other day.”

“That’s what you thought,” said Isabel. “But I know more about you than you think.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How?”

“You told me that you were a psychologist,” Isabel explained. “I telephoned a psychologist friend and found out all I needed to know.”

“Which was?”

“That you had a distinguished career. That you were almost given a personal chair here in Edinburgh. That you published a lot. That’s about it.”

He laughed. “And I know about you,” he said.

Isabel sighed. “Scotland is a village.”

“Yes,” went on Ian. “But so is everywhere. New Yorkers say that about New York. And of course now we have the global village.”

Isabel thought about that for a moment. If we lived in a global village, then the boundaries of our responsibility were greatly extended. The people dying of poverty, the sick, the dis-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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possessed, were our neighbours even if they were far away. And that changed a great deal.

“I asked our mutual friend Peter Stevenson about you,” Ian continued. “He can tell you just about anything. And he said that you were, well, who you are. He also said that you had a reputation for discreetly looking into things.”

“That’s a polite way of putting it,” said Isabel. “Some would call it indecent curiosity. Nosiness, even.”

“There’s nothing wrong with taking an interest in the world,” said Ian. “I’m curious about the world too. I like to speculate as to what lies behind the surface.”

“If anything,” interjected Isabel. “Sometimes the surface is all there is.”

“True, but not always true. Those pictures up there, for instance, the ones we’ve just been looking at: there’s so much behind each of them. But one would have to enquire. One would have to be a bit of a John Berger. You’ve seen his Ways of Seeing? It changed the way I look at things. Completely.”

“I picked it up a long time ago,” said Isabel. “Yes, it makes scales drop from the eyes.”

The waitress arrived at their table, placing a small plate of bread and butter before them. Ian reached out and pushed it over towards Isabel.

“We had a conversation the other day,” he said. “Or we started it, rather. I told you about how it felt to have heart surgery. But I didn’t get very far.”

Isabel watched him. She had decided that she liked him, that she appreciated his openness and his willingness to engage with issues, but now she found herself wondering whether this was to be an operation conversation. People liked to talk about 8 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h their medical problems—for some it was the most interesting of all subjects—but surely Ian could not have sought her out purely as a sympathetic ear for an operation saga.

It was as if she had given voice to her reservations. “Don’t worry, I don’t intend to burden you with the details,” he said quickly. “There’s nothing worse than hearing about the medical problems of others. No, that’s not the issue.”

Isabel looked at him politely. “I don’t mind,” she said. “A friend told me about her ingrown toenail the other day. It was quite a saga. It took her half an hour. Do you know that once the toenail starts to . . .” She stopped, and smiled.

Ian continued. “I wanted to tell you about something quite . . . well, quite unsettling I suppose is the word. Would you mind?”

Isabel shook her head. The waitress had returned with their plates and had placed a helping of mackerel fillets and salad in front of Ian. He thanked her and gazed, with resignation, Isabel thought, at the meal before him. She listened as he began to talk, telling her briefly that he had become ill suddenly, after a massive viral attack, and that his heart, quite simply, had given out. He told of receiving the news that he would need a heart transplant and of his feeling of calm, which surprised even him.

“I found that I really didn’t mind,” he said. “I thought it highly unlikely that a donor would be found in time and that I would be going. I felt no great regrets. I just felt this extraordinary sense of calm. I was astonished.”

The call for the operation came suddenly. He had been out for a walk, at the Canongate Kirk, in fact, and had been fetched.

They told him later that he had travelled over to Glasgow with the donor heart, which was in a container beside him, as the donor had come from Edinburgh. That was all that they said F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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about that, as the donor’s family had wished to remain anonymous. All he knew was that it was a young man, because they had used the male pronoun when they spoke to him about it and they had said that the heart was young.

“I don’t remember a great deal of the next few weeks,” he said. “I lay there in my bed in Glasgow, not knowing what day it was. I drifted in and out of sleep. And then, I slowly came back to life, or that’s what it seemed like. I thought I could feel my new heart, beating within me. I lay and listened to its rhythms, echoed in a machine that they had linked me to. And I felt a curious sadness, a feeling of disjointedness. It was as if my past had been taken away from me and I was adrift. I found that I had nothing to say to anybody. People tried to coax me into conversation, but I just felt this great emptiness. There was nothing for me to say.

“I am told that all of this is quite normal. People feel like that after major heart surgery. And it did get better—once I was home I recovered my sense of who I was. I felt more cheerful.

The emptiness, which was probably some form of depression, disappeared and I began to read books and see friends. At that point I began to feel gratitude—just immense gratitude—to the doctors and the person whose heart I had been given. I wanted to thank the family, but the doctors said that I should respect their desire for anonymity. Sometimes I thought of the donor, whoever he was, and just wept. I suppose that in a sense I was mourning him—I was mourning the death of somebody whom I didn’t know, even whose name was unknown to me.

“I would have loved to have been able to speak to the family. I wrote a letter to them to thank them. You can imagine how difficult it was to do that—to find the words that could do jus-8 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tice to my feelings. When I read the letter over, it sounded stilted to me, but there was nothing I could do about that. It had to be passed on through the doctors—I wonder if the family read it and thought that it sounded formal, and forced. I hate to think that they might have thought that I was writing out of a sense of duty—a formal thank-you letter. But what else could I do?”

He paused, as if expecting a response. Isabel had been listening intently. She had been intrigued by the idea of frustrated gratitude. Should one let people express their gratitude properly, even if one is embarrassed or reluctant to do so? There is an art in accepting a present, and indeed there is sometimes an obligation to let others give. Perhaps the family should have allowed him to meet them, and to thank them properly; one cannot put just any condition one wishes on a gift, a condition should not be unreasonable or demeaning. Isabel had always thought that legacies which stipulated that the beneficiaries should change their names were fundamentally offensive.

“You had no alternative,” she said. “That’s all you could do.

But I think that they might have allowed you to speak with them. You could argue that they had no right to insist on anonymity, given the natural desire that you would have to express your gratitude.”

Ian’s eyes widened. “You think I have the right to know? To know who he was?”

Isabel was not prepared to go that far. “No, I don’t think so.

But obviously you would know who he is once you spoke to them. Your right—if one can call it a right—is to be able to express your very natural and entirely understandable feelings of gratitude. You can’t do that at the moment—or you can’t do it properly.”

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He was silent for a moment. “I see.”

Isabel felt concerned. “I’m not necessarily suggesting that you should pursue that. I don’t have a particularly strong view about it. It’s just a thought—that’s all.” She paused. Was this what he wanted to speak to her about? Did he want her to trace the family for him? She would have to tell him that this was not what she did.

“You should know something,” she began. “Whatever people have said about me, I’m not in the business of going round and finding things out. If you want me—”

He held up a hand. “No, no. It’s not that at all. Please don’t think that—”

Isabel interrupted him. “I suppose that in the past I’ve become involved in, how might one put it, issues in people’s lives. But I’m really just the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. That’s all.”

He shook his head. “I had nothing like that in mind. I felt that . . . well, one of the problems that I’ve had to face is not being able to talk. My wife is worried sick over me and I don’t want to make it worse for her. And the doctors are busy and concerned with getting all the technical things right—the drug dosages and the rest.”

Isabel immediately felt guilty. She had not intended to inhibit him. “Of course I’m happy to hear about all this,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to sound so abrupt.”

He was silent for a moment. He had not yet tackled his mackerel fillets, and now he tentatively cut off a slice. “You see,”

he said, “I’ve had a most extraordinary thing happen to me, and I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about it. I need somebody who will understand the philosophical implications of all this.

That’s why it occurred to me that I could talk to you.”

8 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“People rarely consult philosophers for their advice,” said Isabel, smiling. “I’m flattered!”

There was less tension in his voice as he continued. “All my life has been lived according to rational principles. I believe in scientific evidence and the scientific method.”

“As do I,” said Isabel.

He nodded. “Psychology and philosophy view the world in the same way, don’t they? So both you and I would take the view that unexplained phenomena are simply that and no more—

things that we haven’t yet explained but for which there is either a current explanation in terms of our existing understanding of things, or for which an explanation may emerge in the future.”

Isabel looked out of the window. He had simplified matters rather, but she broadly agreed. But was this the conversation that he had taken such pains to engineer: a discussion of how we view the world?

“Take memory, for example,” Ian went on. “We have a general idea of how it works—that there are physical traces in the brain. We know where some of these are. Mostly in the hippocampus, but there are other bits in the cerebellum.”

“London taxi drivers,” interjected Isabel.

Ian laughed. “Exactly. They found out that they had a larger hippocampus than the rest of us because they’ve had to memo-rise all those streets in order to get their licence.”

“At least they know how to get you there,” said Isabel.

“Unlike some places. I had to take control of a taxi in Dallas once and do the map-reading and direct the driver. I was visiting my cousin there. Mimi McKnight. And when I eventually arrived at her house, cousin Mimi remarked: ‘Every society gets the taxi drivers it deserves.’ Do you think that’s true, Ian?” She answered F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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her own question. “No. The United States is a good country. It deserves better taxi drivers.”

“And better politicians?”

“Undoubtedly.”

He ate a bit more of his mackerel, while Isabel finished her potato salad.

“Could memory be located elsewhere?” he asked. “What if we were wrong about the physical basis of memory?”

“You mean it might be located somewhere other than in the brain?”

“Yes. Bits of it might.”

“Unlikely, surely.”

He sat back in his chair. “Why? The immune system remembers things. My immune system remembers, doesn’t it?

Worms that are fed other bits of worms have been shown to have absorbed the characteristics of the consumed worm. It’s known as cellular memory.”

“Then why don’t you show the characteristics of a mackerel?” Isabel asked. “Why don’t you start remembering how to do whatever it is that mackerel do?”

He laughed. Although he might not have, thought Isabel.

And I should be more careful in what I say to him. He’s trusting me in this conversation and I must not be flippant.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a rather silly thing to say.”

“It was very amusing,” he said. “I’ve been surrounded by rather literal people recently. It’s nice to have a change.” He paused, looking out of the window at the trees in Rutland Square. Isabel followed his gaze. There was a slight breeze and the branches of the trees were swaying against the sky.

“I’ll get to the point,” Ian continued. “Cellular memory 9 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h theory—if you can call it that—would find it perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory. So when I received the heart of another, I acquired some of that person’s memories.”

Isabel was silent. Then: “Did that happen?”

He looked down at the table, fingering the edge of the tablecloth. “I don’t know what to say. My instinct as a scientist—as a rationalist—is to say that it’s complete nonsense. I know that there have been all these stories about people acquiring the characteristics of the donors who have given them an organ.

People have made films about it. I would have dismissed all that as pure fantasy.”

“Would have?” asked Isabel.

Ian looked at his mackerel, moving it to the side of the plate. “Yes. Would have. Now I’m not so sure.” He paused, searching her expression for signs of ridicule. And she watched him too. He is embarrassed, she thought, as any rational person might be in the face of the inexplicable.

“I’m not going to laugh at you,” she said quietly.

He smiled. “Thank you,” he began. “You see, I now have a recurring memory, one I didn’t have before. It’s very vivid. It’s something which I think I remember, but which I never experienced, as far as I know.”

“You can tell me about it,” she said. “Go on. Tell me.”

“Thank you,” he said again. “It’ll be a great relief just to talk about it. I’m actually feeling a bit desperate, you know. This thing that is happening to me is very unsettling, and I fear that it’s going to hinder my recovery, unless I can sort it out.” He paused, staring down at his plate. “In fact, I’m worried that it’s going to kill me.”

C H A P T E R T E N

E

GRACE WAS EARLY the following morning. “A miracle,” she announced as she entered Isabel’s kitchen. “An early bus. Two, in fact. I had a choice.”

Isabel greeted her absent-mindedly. The Scotsman, open in front of her on the table, reported a bank robbery that had gone wrong when the robbers had inadvertently locked themselves in the vault. Isabel finished reading the report and then told Grace about it.

“That goes to prove it,” said Grace. “There are no intelligent criminals.”

Isabel reached for the coffeepot. “Surely there must be some,” she said mildly. “These criminal masterminds one hears about. The ones who never get caught.”

Grace shook her head. “They usually get arrested in the end,” she said. “People don’t get away with things for ever.”

Isabel thought for a moment. Was this true? She doubted it.

There were unsolved murders, to start with: Jack the Ripper was probably never caught, and Bible John, the Bible-quoting murderer who had so terrified Glasgow, was probably still alive 9 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h somewhere in the west of Scotland, a man now in early old age, leading a normal life. He appeared to have got away with it, as had various war criminals. Perhaps the bigger the crime the more one was likely to go unpunished. The dictators, the com-missioners of genocide, the looters of the treasuries of nations—

they often escaped, while the small fry, the non-commissioned officers, the small-scale fixers, were pursued and caught.

She was about to say something to this effect, but stopped herself. Grace could dig in over a position and the discussion would reach no conclusion. Besides, there was something else that she wanted to tell Grace about. Her discussion with Ian over lunch the previous day was still fresh in her mind; indeed, she had awoken in the early hours of the morning and thought about it, lying in bed, listening to the wind in the trees outside.

“I had the most extraordinary conversation yesterday,” she began. “With a man who has had his heart replaced. Have you ever met anybody who’s had a heart transplant?”

Grace shook her head. “My mother could have done with one,” she mused. “But they didn’t work in those days. Or they didn’t have enough hearts to go round.”

“I’m sorry,” said Isabel. There was a hinterland of unremit-ting hard work and suffering in Grace’s life, and occasionally this became apparent in what she said.

“We all have to go,” said Grace. “And it’s only a question of crossing over. It’s nothing to be afraid of—the other side.”

Isabel said nothing. She was not sure about the other side, but was open-minded enough to accept that we could not say with certainty that some form of spiritual survival was impossible. It all depended, she thought, on the existence of a necessary connection between consciousness and physical matter.

And since it was impossible to identify the location of conF R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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sciousness, one could not rule out the persistence of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. There were some philosophers who thought of nothing but consciousness—“the ultimate knotty philosophical problem,” her old professor had said—

but she was not one of them. So she simply said: “Yes, the other side . . . ,” and then, “But he never reached the other side, of course. His new heart saved him.”

Grace looked at her expectantly. “And?”

“And then he started to have the most extraordinary experiences.” She paused, and gestured for Grace to help herself to a cup of coffee from the coffeepot. “You see,” she went on, “he’s a psychologist. Or, rather, he was, and he had read articles about the psychological problems that people have after heart operations. It’s very unsettling, apparently.”

“I can well imagine,” said Grace. “A new heart beating away within you. I would feel very unsettled.” She shuddered. “I’m not sure I would like it, you know. Somebody else’s heart. You might suddenly find yourself falling in love with the dead person’s boyfriend, or whatever. Imagine that!”

Isabel leant forward. “But that’s precisely what he says happened. He didn’t exactly fall in love like that, but he has experienced some of the things that people are meant to experience in those circumstances. The most extraordinary things.”

Grace now sat down opposite Isabel. This was very much her territory—the vaguely chilling, the inexplicable. But I’m just as interested in this, reflected Isabel: let she who is without gullibility cast the first stone.

“He told me,” Isabel continued, “that from time to time he experiences a sudden jolt of pain. Not in his heart, but all over the front of his body and his shoulders. And then he sees something. Every time. The pain is accompanied by a vision.”

9 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace began to smile. “But you don’t believe in manifesta-tions,” she said. “You told me that. Remember? I had spoken to you about a manifestation that we saw at one of the meetings, and you said . . .”

It was reasonable enough, thought Isabel, for Grace to feel a certain triumph over this; but he had not said there was a manifestation. There was at least some rationalist ground to be defended. “I didn’t say anything about a manifestation,” she said. “A vision and a manifestation are quite different things.

One is outside you, the other inside.”

Grace looked doubtful. “I’m not sure that there’s much difference. But anyway, what did he see?”

“A face.”

“Just a face?”

Isabel took a sip of her coffee. “Yes. Not much of a manifestation, that. But it is rather odd, isn’t it? To see the same face.

And to see it at the same time as the pain comes on.”

Grace looked down at the tablecloth. With an index finger she traced a pattern; Isabel watched, but realised that it was nothing special, just a doodle. Did Grace go in for spirit-writing?

she wondered. Spirit-writing had its possibilities—if it existed.

Had somebody not been in touch with Schubert and acted as amanuensis while Schubert had dictated a symphony? Isabel smiled as she wondered whether the composer had suggested a name for this symphony: The Other Side might be appropriate, perhaps. She glanced at Grace, who was still staring fixedly at the table, and she suppressed her smile.

Grace looked up. “So who does he think it is? Is it somebody he remembers?”

Isabel explained that it was not. The face, Ian had said, was F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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of nobody he knew, but was memorable: a high-browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline.

“But here,” Isabel continued, “here’s the really interesting bit.

As I told you, this person to whom I was talking is a psychologist.

He looked up what has been written about the experiences of people who have had heart transplants. And he found that there was quite a bit. Some books. A few articles.

“Somebody wrote a book about it some years ago. It described how a woman who received the heart of a young man started to behave in a totally different way. She became much more aggressive, which I suppose anybody might after having their heart taken out of them and replaced, but she also started to dress in a different way and to eat different food. She started to like chicken nuggets, which she had never liked before. Of course they then found out that the young man who donated his heart had had a particular liking for chicken nuggets.”

Grace shook her head. “I can’t abide them,” she said.

“Tasteless things.”

Isabel agreed. But chicken nuggets were not the point of the story. “He also looked at various articles,” she went on, “and there he found something very interesting. He stumbled across an article by some psychologists in the United States who looked at ten cases in which there had been changes in behaviour by people who had received the hearts of others. One of them caught his eye.”

Grace was sitting almost bolt upright. Isabel reached for the coffeepot and poured her housekeeper another cup. “With all this talk of the heart,” she said, “can you feel your heart beating within you? And does coffee make it go faster?”

Grace thought for a moment. “I don’t like to think about 9 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that,” she said. “You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It’s rather like breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe.” She took a sip of coffee. “But let’s get back to these cases. He said that one caught his eye. Why?”

“They,” Isabel began, “that is, the people who wrote the article, went to see a man who said that since he had received his new heart he had sudden pains in his face, saw flashes of light and then a face. He gave a good description of this face, just as my friend did.

“The researchers found that the person who had given the heart was a young man who had been shot—in the face. The police thought they knew who shot him, but could not prove anything. But the police showed the researchers a picture of the suspected gunman—and it was exactly like the face which the recipient described.”

Grace reached for her cup. “In other words,” she said, “the heart was remembering what happened.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Or that’s what appears to have happened.

The people who wrote the article are properly sceptical. All they say is that if there is such a thing as cellular memory, then this might be a case of it. Or . . .”

“Or?”

Isabel gestured airily. “Or it can all be explained by the fact that the drugs which the patient was taking led to hallucina-tions. Drugs can make you see flashes of light and so on.”

“But what about the similarities in the faces?” Grace asked.

“Coincidence,” suggested Isabel. But she did not feel much enthusiasm for this explanation, and Grace realised it.

“You don’t really think that it was sheer coincidence, do you?” Grace said.

Isabel did not know what to think. “I don’t know,” she said.

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“Perhaps it’s one of those situations where one simply has to say that one doesn’t know.”

Grace rose to her feet. She had work to do. But there was an observation that she felt she needed to make. “But I remember your saying to me—some time ago—that we either know something or we don’t. You said that there could be no halfway houses. You did say that, you know.”

“Did I?” said Isabel. “Well, maybe I did.”

“And perhaps what you meant to say is that there are some occasions when we must say that we just can’t be sure,” said Grace.

“Perhaps,” said Isabel.

Grace nodded. “If you’d like to come to one of the meetings some day you could see what I mean.”

For a moment Isabel felt alarmed. She had no desire to become involved in séances, but to refuse would seem churl-ish and would be interpreted as a recanting on the open-mindedness that Grace had just obliged her to acknowledge.

But would she be able to keep a straight face while the medium claimed to talk to the other side? Would there be knocking on tables and low moans from the spirit world? It was a source of complete astonishment to her that somebody as down-to-earth, as straightforward, as Grace could have this peculiar interest in spiritualism. It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had seen suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intel-lectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with our character. The most surprising people did the most remarkable things. Auden, she remembered, had written a line about a retired dentist who painted nothing but mountains.

That had interested her because of the juxtaposition of dentistry and mountains. Why was it that anything which a dentist would 9 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h do would seem almost poignant? My dentist collects toy trains, she might say—because it was true. But why was that any funnier than saying that a bank manager kept toy trains? Or was that funny too?

“I can tell that you think it’ll be funny,” said Grace, as she made her way to the cupboard where she kept her cleaning equipment. “But it isn’t, you know. It’s serious. Very serious. And you meet some interesting people there too.” She was standing in front of the cupboard now, extracting a broom, but still talking. “I’ve just met a rather nice man in our group, you know. His wife went over into spirit a year or so ago. He’s very pleasant.”

Isabel looked up sharply, but Grace had started to leave the room. She glanced at Isabel as she did so, but only briefly, and it was a glance that gave nothing away. Isabel looked through the open door, at the place where Grace had been standing, and mulled over what she had said. But then her thoughts returned to Ian, and to their curious, unnerving conversation in the Arts Club. He had said that he was concerned that the images that he was seeing would kill him—a strange thing to say, she thought, and she had asked him to explain why he should feel this. Sadness, he had said. Sadness. “I feel this terrible sadness when it happens. I can’t tell you what it’s like—but it’s the sorrow of death. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s just what it is. I’m sorry.”

C H A P T E R E L E V E N

E

ISABEL DID NOT LIKE her desk to get too cluttered, but that did not mean that it was uncluttered. In fact, most of the time there were too many papers on it, usually manuscripts that had to be sent off for peer assessment. She was not sure about the term peer assessment, even if it was the widely accepted term for a crucial stage in the publishing of journal articles. Sometimes the expression amounted to exactly that: equals looked dispassionately at papers by equals and gave their view. But Isabel had discovered that this did not always happen, and papers were consigned into the hands of their authors’ friends or enemies.

This was unwitting; it was impossible for anybody to keep track of the jealousies and rivalries that riddled academia, and Isabel had to hope that she could spot the concealed agendas that lay behind outright antagonism or, more often, and more subtly, veiled antagonism: “an interesting piece, perhaps interesting enough to attract a ripple of attention.” Philosophers could be nasty, she reflected, and moral philosophers the nastiest of all.

Now, seated at her cluttered desk, she began the task of clearing at least some of the piles of paper. She worked energeti-cally, and it was almost twelve when she glanced at the clock.

1 0 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She had done, she thought, enough work for the morning, and perhaps for the day. She stood up, stretched, and went over to her study window to look out on the garden. The display of pinks in the flowerbed that ran alongside the far garden wall was as bright as it ever had been, and the line of lavender bushes that she had planted a few years previously was in full flower.

She looked down at the flowerbed immediately below her window. Somebody had been digging at the roots of an azalea and had kicked small piles of soil onto the edge of the lawn. She smiled. Brother Fox.

She very rarely saw Brother Fox, who was discreet in his movements, as befitted one who must have thought that he lived in enemy territory. Not that Isabel was an enemy; she was an ally, and he might just have sensed that when he found the chicken carcasses that she left out for him. Once she had seen him at close quarters, and he had turned tail and fled, but had stopped after a few paces and they had looked at one another. Their eyes met for only a few seconds, but it was enough for Brother Fox to realise that her intentions towards him were not hostile, and she saw his body relax before he turned and trotted off.

She was looking at the signs of his digging when the telephone rang.

“So,” said Cat, who always started telephone conversations abruptly. “Working?”

Isabel looked at her desk, now half clear. “I was,” she said.

“But have you any better ideas?”

“You sound as if you want an excuse.”

“I do,” said Isabel. “I was going to stop anyway, but an excuse would be welcome.”

“Well,” said Cat. “My Italian friend has arrived. Tomasso.

Remember the one I told you about.”

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1 0 1

Isabel was guarded. Cat was sensitive about Isabel’s past interference in her affairs, and she did not want to say anything that could be misconstrued. So she simply said, “Good.”

There was a silence. “Good,” said Isabel again.

“I thought that you might like to come and have lunch here,” said Cat. “In the delicatessen. He’s coming back once he’s put his car away safely at the hotel. He’s staying at Preston-field House.”

“You don’t think that I shall be . . . in the way?” she asked.

“Won’t you want to . . . to have lunch by yourselves? I’m not sure if you’ll want me there.”

Cat laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s nothing between him and me. I’m not thinking of getting involved, if that’s worrying you. He’s good company, but that’s as far as it goes.”

Isabel wanted to ask whether Tomasso thought that too, but said nothing. She was serious about not interfering and any remark like that could easily be seen as interference. At the same time, she felt relieved that Tomasso was not going to be Cat’s new boyfriend. She knew that it was wrong to judge him on the basis of scanty evidence—no evidence at all, in fact—

but surely there was good reason to feel concerned. A handsome young Italian—she assumed he was handsome: all of Cat’s male friends were—with a taste for vintage Bugattis would hardly be the reliable, home-loving sort. A breaker of speed limits—and hearts, she thought, and almost muttered, but stopped herself in time.

“Will you come over?” said Cat.

“Of course,” said Isabel. “If you really want me to.”

“I do,” said Cat. “I’ve got a salad specially prepared for you.

Extra olives. The ones you like.”

“I would have come anyway,” said Isabel. “You know that.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Upstairs, she looked at herself in the mirror. She was wearing the dove-grey skirt that she often wore when editing. It was complemented, if complemented were not too strong a term, by a loose, cream wool cardigan on which a small smudge of ink had appeared on the left sleeve. She smiled. This would not do. One could not meet a man with an interest in vintage Bugattis in such an outfit; indeed, one could not meet any Italian dressed like that.

She opened her wardrobe. Guilty by Design, she thought, looking at a black shift dress she had bought from the aptly named dress shop in Morningside, for there was a great deal of guilt involved in the buying of expensive dresses—delicious guilt; she had loved that dress and had worn it too often. Italians wore black, did they not? So something different—a red cashmere polo-neck would transform the skirt, and a pair of dangly diamanté earrings would add to the effect. There! Cat would be proud of her. Tomasso’s own aunt would probably wear widow’s weeds and have a moustache and— She stopped herself. Not only was that uncharitable, but it was probably also incorrect.

Italian aunts used to run to fat and excessive hair, but things had changed, had they not, and now they were more likely to be slender, fashionable, tanned.

She called out a goodbye to Grace, who replied from somewhere deep within the house, and then made her way outside.

The students from Napier University nearby had lined the street with their cars, which irritated the neighbours but which Isabel did not mind too much. Local people were never all that real to students; they were the backdrop for the student drama of parties and long conversations over cups of coffee and . . .

Isabel paused. What else did students do? Well, she knew the F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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answer to that, and why should they not, as long as they were responsible about it? She did not approve of promiscuity, which she thought made a mockery of our duty to cherish and respect others; an emotional fast food, really, which one would not wish on anybody. But at the same time one should not starve oneself.

As she turned into Merchiston Crescent, the road that wound its way towards Bruntsfield and Cat’s delicatessen, Isabel imagined what it would be like to give to others the gift of love. Not from oneself—as that may be unwanted—but from those whose love the recipient yearned for. Such a power that would be, she thought. Here, my dear, is the girl whom you have admired for so long, and yes, she is yours. And here, for you, is that desirable boy whose eye you have so long tried to catch, in vain; well, try catching it now.

I do not even have a man myself, Isabel said to herself; I am in no position to give one to another. Of course, she had not over-exercised herself in the obtaining of a man, not since John Liamor. For some years after that, a long time, she had not even been sure that she wanted one. But now, she thought, she was ready again to take the risk that men brought with them—the risk of being left, cheated upon, made unhappy. She could get one if she wanted, she imagined. She was young enough and attractive enough to compete. Men found her interesting; she knew that, because they showed it in the way they reacted to her. It would be good to go out to dinner with the right man. She could see herself sitting at a table in the window at Oloroso, looking out over the roofs of George Street to Fife in the distance, and a man on the other side of the table, a man who was a good conversationalist, with a sense of humour, who would make her laugh, but who could make her cry, too, when he 1 0 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h spoke of the more important, moving things. A man just like . . .

She racked her brain. What men like that were there? And, more to the point perhaps, where were they?

Jamie, of course. He came unbidden into her mind, sitting at that unreal table at Oloroso, watching her with those grey eyes of his, and speaking to her about exactly those things that they liked to speak about. She closed her eyes. It was too late.

There had been a fatal, anachronistic error in the stars that had brought them together. Had she been born fifteen years later, then it would have been a perfect match, and she could imagine herself fighting tooth and nail to possess him—he would have been all that she wanted; but now, it was inappropriate, and impossible, and she had decided not even to think about it. She had freed herself of those thoughts of Jamie in the same way in which an addict frees himself of thoughts of the bottle, or the racetrack, or the bedroom.

She was approaching the end of Merchiston Crescent, and she saw ahead the busy line of cars coming into town from Morningside and further south. Cat’s delicatessen was in the middle of a block, with a jeweller on one side and an antiques shop on the other. A few doors further down, on the same side as the delicatessen, was the fishmonger from whom her father had bought his Loch Fyne kippers for all those years. She had seen the antiques dealer buying kippers himself, bending down to peer at the smoked fish on the slab. One of the pleasures of living in an intimate city, she thought, was that one could know so much about one’s fellow citizens. This was what made those small Italian cities so comfortable: the fact that there was so little anonymity. She remembered visiting her friend who lived in Reggio Emilia, the same friend who had taken her to the Parmesan factory, and taking a stroll with her in the piazza. It seemed F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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that they stopped every second minute to pass the time of day with somebody. That one was a cousin; that one was a friend of an aunt; that one had lived on the floor below for a year or two and had then gone to Milan, but must be back; that one had the cruellest nickname when he was at school, yes, they called him that, they really did. One could not stroll in quite the same way in Edinburgh—the weather was hardly perfect for la bella figura—but one could at least see people one knew buying kippers.

Cat’s delicatessen was busy when she arrived. As well as employing Eddie full-time, Cat had now taken on a young woman, Shona, who worked several hours a day and who was now at the counter, slicing salami. Cat was weighing cheese and Eddie was at the cash register. Isabel wondered whether she should offer to help, but thought perhaps that she might just get in the way. So she sat down at a table and picked up a magazine that was lying on the floor, abandoned by some untidy previous customer.

She was immersed in an article by the time Cat came over to see her.

“He’ll be here any moment,” Cat muttered. “I’m sure you’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I shall,” said Isabel mildly.

“No, I mean really like him,” Cat said. “Just wait and see.”

Isabel was intrigued. “But I thought you sounded a little bit . . . how shall I put it? A little bit lukewarm when you spoke about him, on the phone.”

“Oh,” said Cat lightly. “If you mean I sounded as if he’s not for me, yes, that’s right. He isn’t. But . . . But you’ll see what I mean.”

“What’s the snag?” asked Isabel.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat sighed. “Age.”

“Age? How old is he? Seventy-five?”

“Not quite,” said Cat. “About your age, I would have thought. Early forties.”

Isabel was taken aback. “Over the hill in that case. You think.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Cat. “Forty’s nothing really. Forty is thirty these days, I know. I know. It’s just that for me, from the perspective of twenty-something, forty-something is . . . I’m afraid I don’t see myself falling for somebody who’s almost twenty years older than I am. That’s all. It’s simply a question of sticking to one’s contemporaries.”

Isabel touched her niece on the forearm in a gesture of reassurance. “That’s perfectly reasonable,” she said. “You don’t have to apologise.”

“Thank you.” Cat looked up. The door had opened and a man had entered. He cast a quick eye about the delicatessen and, spotting Cat, gave her a wave.

Tomasso came over to the table. Cat rose to her feet and gave him her hand. Isabel watched, and then he turned to her, and reached forward to shake hands with her. He was smiling, and she saw his eyes move across her, not very obviously or crudely, but move nonetheless.

He sat down with them and Cat went to fetch him the glass of mineral water for which he had asked. It was too late for coffee, he said, and he was not hungry. “Water,” he said, “will be perfect.”

He turned to Isabel and smiled. “Your city is very beautiful,”

he said. “We Italians think of Scotland as being so romantic and here it is, just as we imagined it!”

“And we have our own ideas about Italy,” said Isabel.

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He inclined his head slightly. “Which are?”

“So romantic,” said Isabel.

Tomasso’s eyes widened with mirth. “Well,” he said. “We are in the realm of cliché, are we not?”

Isabel agreed. But the clichés came from somewhere, and that was why they tended to have a measure of truth in them. If Italy was not romantic, then what country was? She looked at Tomasso, a bland look, she hoped, but one which concealed serious examination. He was tall and well built, and his features, which were strong, were . . . were familiar. He looked like somebody she knew, but who was it? And then, in a moment, she realised who it was. This was Jamie fifteen years on.

The realisation surprised her, and for a few moments she was sunk in thought. Jamie was the borderline-Mediterranean type, as she had often observed, and so it was perhaps not surprising that there should be some similarities between him and Tomasso, who was the real thing. But it went beyond that: there was something in the expression and in the way of speaking that made the two seem so similar. If you closed your eyes, briefly, which she now did, briefly, and if you factored out the Italian pronunciation, then it could be Jamie with her. But Jamie would never come into Cat’s delicatessen—even now.

This unexpected comparison unnerved her and for a moment she floundered. The banal came to her rescue. “You speak such beautiful English,” she said.

Tomasso, who had been about to say something, inclined his head. “I’m glad you understand me. I’ve lived in London, by the way. I was there for four years, working in an Italian bank.

You wouldn’t have said that I spoke good English when I first arrived. They used to stare at me and ask me to repeat what I had just said.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“They’re ones to talk,” said Isabel. “With their Estuary English and its words all run together. The language is being murdered daily.”

“The bank paid for me to have lessons with an elocution teacher,” said Tomasso. “He made me hold a mirror in front of my mouth and say things like The rain in Spain . . . ”

“Falls mainly on the plain,” supplied Isabel.

“And where’s that ghastly plain?” asked Tomasso.

“In Spain,” Isabel answered.

They laughed. She looked at him, noticing the small lines around the edge of the mouth that told her that this was a man who was used to laughter.

“Is my niece going to show you Scotland?” Isabel asked.

Tomasso shrugged. “I asked her if she would, but unfortunately she cannot. She is very tied up with this business. But I shall see what I can myself.”

Isabel asked him if he was going to Inverness. Visitors to Scotland made the mistake—in her view—of going to Inverness, which was a pleasant city, but nothing more. There were far better places to go, she thought.

“Yes,” he said. “Inverness. Everybody tells me I must go there.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s . . .” He trailed off, and then burst out laughing. “I shall not go there. I shall not.”

“Good,” said Isabel.

Cat returned. She was not going to be able to show Tomasso Scotland, but she was able to get away to show him Edinburgh that afternoon. Would Isabel care to accompany them?

Isabel hesitated. She noticed Tomasso glance at Cat after F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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the invitation had been extended; just a quick glance, but enough to tell her that he did not want her to go along.

“I’m sorry,” Isabel said, “but duty calls. My desk is looking awful. In fact, I can’t see the surface for papers.”

Cat looked at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

she asked. “Couldn’t the work wait?”

There was a brief exchange of glances—a niece-to-aunt exchange, a look between women, private, although in the presence of a man. Isabel interpreted it as a plea, and realised that Cat wanted her to be with her. Of course she would have to accede to the request, which she did.

“Yes, of course the work can wait,” she said. “I’d love to come.”

Tomasso turned to face her. “But I cannot put you out like that. No. No. Please: we shall do it some other time when nobody is busy.”

“It’s no difficulty,” said Isabel. “I have plenty of time.”

Tomasso was insistent. “I cannot allow you to be inconvenienced. I have plenty to do myself. I have some business here in Edinburgh—there are people I must see.”

Isabel glanced at Cat. She felt a momentary sense of disappointment that he did not want her company; that was obvious.

Cat, though, had her difficulties ahead. Tomasso was insistent, it seemed, and would not be put off that easily.

The Italian rose to his feet. “I am keeping you both from your work,” he said. “It’s so easy, when one is on holiday oneself, to forget that everybody else has their work to do. Cat? May I telephone you tomorrow?”

“Of course,” said Cat. “I’ll be here. Working, I’m afraid, but I’ll be here.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He turned to Isabel. “And perhaps we shall be able to meet too?”

“I’m here too,” said Isabel. “And I’ll be happy to show you round. I really would.”

Tomasso smiled at her. “You are very kind.”

He bent forward and took Cat’s hand in his; a lingering grasp, thought Isabel. Cat reddened. It was going to be difficult, Isabel thought, but Cat had to learn how to discourage men.

And the easiest way of doing that, in Isabel’s view, was to show excessive eagerness. Men did not like to be pursued; she would have to tell Cat that, tactfully, of course, but as explicitly as she could.

C H A P T E R T W E L V E

E

WELL, Miss Dalhousie. It is Miss Dalhousie, isn’t it?”

Isabel nodded to the young man behind the enquiries desk at the library. “It is. Well remembered.”

She looked at him, noticing the clean white shirt and the carefully knotted tie, the slightly earnest appearance. He was the sort who noticed things. “How do you do it?” she asked. “You must get so many people coming in here.”

The young man looked pleased with the compliment. He was proud of his memory, which came in useful professionally, but the reason why he remembered Isabel was that she had, on an earlier visit, explained to him that she was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. For a young librarian, fresh from a spell as a junior in the journals department, that was an exotic and exalted position.

He smiled at Isabel. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“I need to see copies of the Evening News for this past October,” said Isabel. She gave him the date and he told her that she was in luck; while the earlier issues were on microfiche, they still had bound volumes of the more recent months and he would bring these over to her personally. Isabel thanked him 1 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and took a seat near the window. As she waited she could look down into the Grassmarket and watch people window-shopping.

It had changed so much, she reflected. When she had been young, the Grassmarket had been a distinctly insalubrious place, with winos slumped in the doorways and small knots of desolate people standing outside the entrance to the doss-houses. What had happened to the Castle Trades Hotel, which took through its doorway the homeless and destitute and gave them a bowl of soup and a bed for the night? It had become an upmarket hotel for tourists, its old clientele dispersed, vanished, dead. And a few doors away from it a glittering bank and a shop selling fossils. Money pushed people out of cities; it always had. And yet no matter how much the exterior of the city changed, the same human types were still there; wearing different clothes, more prosperous now, but with the same craggy faces that were always there to be seen on the streets of Edinburgh.

The young man returned with a large blue folder of bound newspapers. “This is two months’ worth,” he said. “But it includes October.”

Isabel thanked him and opened the cover of the folder. The front page of the Edinburgh Evening News of the first of October greeted her eyes. There had been a fire in a nightclub, a large banner headline announced, and there was a picture of firemen directing a stream of water onto a collapsed section of roof. Nobody had been hurt, she read, because the fire occurred after-hours when the building was empty. Isabel was suspicious.

Fires in bars and nightclubs were a well-known way of dealing with shrinking profits. Occasionally there were arrests, but usually nothing could be proved, in spite of the best efforts of the loss adjusters. So the insurers paid up and another, better-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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positioned bar or nightclub popped up in the place of the one that had gone.

She turned the page and began to read another story. A male teacher had been accused of making indecent remarks to a girl pupil. The teacher had been suspended and would face what was described as a rigorous inquiry into the incident. “This sort of thing cannot be allowed to happen,” said an official from the education department. Isabel paused. Who knew that it had happened? Surely the whole point of an inquiry was to find out whether anything happened at all, and yet here was the official prejudging the matter before a shred of evidence had been produced. And would it not be the easiest thing in the world for a streetwise teenage girl to make up an allegation of that sort in order to embarrass or destroy a teacher to whom she had taken a dislike?

There was a photograph of the suspended teacher, a man in his late thirties, Isabel thought, frowning at the camera. Isabel studied the photograph. It was a kind face, she decided, not the face of a predator. And here, she said to herself, is the victim of the witch-hunt, or its modern equivalent. Not much has changed. Witchcraft or sexual harassment: the tactics of perse-cution were much the same—the loathed enemy was identified and then demonised. And exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims. And yet, she thought: What if the girl had been telling the truth? What then?

She sighed. The world was an imperfect place, and our search for justice in it seemed an impossible task. But she had not come to the library to be immersed in such reports and the speculations they provoked. She had come to find out about the 1 1 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h events of a very particular week: the week during which Ian had had his heart transplant. That was in mid-October, which would be about a quarter of the way through the volume, she assumed.

She slid a finger into the bound pages and turned over the heavy wad of paper. October the tenth: she had come in too early. She fingered the paper, preparing to turn another week’s worth of papers. But before she did so, she saw the headline: “Teacher Dies.” It was the same man, the one who had been suspended from duties pending the investigation of an allegation against him. He had been found dead at the edge of the Pentland Hills, just outside the city. A note had been recovered, and the police were not treating the death as suspicious. He was survived by a wife and two children.

Isabel read the report with a heavy heart. A friend was quoted as saying that he was an innocent man who had been hounded to his death. The police confirmed that a teenager, who could not be named for legal reasons but who was connected with the case, had been charged with a separate offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice. That meant the making of a false allegation.

She made a conscious effort to put the case out of her mind.

She had the moral energy, she thought, for one issue at a time.

She could do nothing to help that schoolteacher and his sorrowing family. But she could help Ian, if he wanted her help—

which was another matter. Now she was looking at the first newspaper in her targeted week, and she ran her eye over each column, scanning the pages for the headline that she wanted.

“Major Row Hits City Parks.” No. “Lord Provost Defends Road Plans, Says Public Will Come to Welcome Them.” No. “Police Dog Turns on Handler, Is Demoted.” No. (She avoided the F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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temptation to read that one; she had to get on with the task in hand. Demoted?)

It was all the typical stuff of local papers: the planning disputes, the school prize-givings, the crimes great and small. It was immensely distracting, as local papers always are, but she persisted and, four days into her search (in newspaper terms), she came across the information for which she had been looking.

A young man had been killed in what appeared to be a hit-and-run incident. There was his photograph, across two columns, a young man of twenty, wearing a white shirt and a plain tie, smiling into the camera. Rory Macleod, the caption read. Former pupil of James Gillespie’s School. Shortly after the celebration of his twentieth birthday.

Isabel studied the face. He had been the sort of young man she had walked past every day in Bruntsfield, or George Street, or anywhere like that. He could have been a student or, with his white shirt and tie, a bank clerk from the Bank of Scotland in Morningside. In other words, he was unexceptional, as she had imagined he would be.

She turned to the report. He had played in a squash match in Colinton, the newspaper said, and had then gone with friends for a pint of beer at the Canny Man’s. A friend had walked with him as far as the post office and then had left him to go up to the Braids while he had turned left into Nile Grove.

Possibly only five or ten minutes after the friend had said goodbye to him, he was found in Nile Grove itself, lying on the edge of the pavement, half hidden by a parked car. An ambulance was called and he was taken to the Infirmary, but he died later that night. He had been only twenty yards away from his front door. The newspaper then gave the address of that front door 1 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and a quote from an uncle, who spoke of the devastation of the family and the sense of loss at the ending of a life so full of promise. And that was all.

Isabel read through the report several times. She noted the number of the house in Nile Grove and the name of the uncle who had been interviewed. He had an unusual name, Archi-bald, which would make it comparatively easy to trace him, should she need to do so. She took a last look at the photograph, at the face of Rory Macleod, and then turned to the next day’s Evening News. There was a further small item on the incident, confirming that Rory appeared to have been struck by a car and fatally injured. The police had appealed for anybody who had been in the vicinity of Nile Grove that night to come forward.

“Anything you saw may be important,” the police spokesman said. “Any unusual behaviour. Anything out of the ordinary.”

She looked at the following day’s paper, but there was nothing more on the incident. So she closed the folder and started to carry it back to the young man at the enquiry desk. He saw her coming and leapt to his feet.

“Miss Dalhousie,” he whispered. “Please let me take that.”

She handed him the folder and thanked him.

“How is the Review going?” he asked her, as he took the folder from her.

“I’m almost putting the next issue to bed,” said Isabel. “It’s a busy time for me.”

He nodded. He would have liked to have asked her for a job, but he could not bring himself to do so. He would stay in the library service, he thought, and become old like those above him. And Isabel, looking at him, at his eager face, reflected on mortality. He could have been the young man in that photograph, but was not. Rory had died instead of this young man, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E