Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

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because Rory had had the bad luck to be at that precise point in Nile Grove at the exact moment when the driver of the car had struck him. And then she thought of the driver. That could have been me, she reflected, or this young librarian, but it was not.

That had been a man with a high brow and hooded eyes, and with that scar. Or it could have been. Just could have been.

S H E H A D A R R A N G E D to meet Jamie at the Elephant House, a café farther down George IV Bridge. It was a spacious, L-shaped room, with windows at the back which looked down on Candlemaker Row. High-ceilinged and with exposed floorboards, it had a slightly cavernous feel to it—a cavern adorned with pictures and models of elephants on every wall. Isabel felt comfortable there, amongst its elephants and students, and regularly chose it as a place to meet her friends. And if her Sunday Philosophy Club were ever to meet again—it seemed to be impossible to find a date that suited the members—then this would have been a good place to sit and talk about the nature of good and our understanding of the world. For Jamie, who taught bassoon for six hours a week at George Heriot’s School, it was less of a meeting place than a convenient place to go for a strong coffee after finishing with his pupils.

He was already there when she arrived, sitting at a table near a window in the back part of the room, a cup of coffee in front of him and immersed in one of the café’s copies of the Scotsman. He looked up as she arrived and rose to his feet in welcome.

“You’ve been here for hours,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Five minutes,” he said. “Still on page three of the newspaper.”

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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 put the paper to one side and offered to go and buy her coffee.

“That can wait, Jamie,” said Isabel. “I’ve been reading the newspaper too.”

He glanced at the paper. “And?”

“The Evening News, ” she went on. “In the library.”

“What an odd thing to do,” he said. “Unless . . .” He paused.

Isabel had that look about her which told him she was on to something. He could always tell when she was about to embark on some temporary obsession. It was a look in her eyes, perhaps, a look of determination, a look that said I shall not rest until I get to the bottom of this.

For a moment Isabel appeared embarrassed. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I suppose that I am on to something.” She held up a hand. “I know, I know: you don’t have to tell me again.”

Jamie sighed. “I wasn’t going to lecture you. I know that that’s no use—you’ll go right ahead, no matter what I say. All I would say is this: Be careful. One of these days you’re going to get involved in something which gets seriously out of hand. You will, you know. You really will.”

“I understand that perfectly well,” said Isabel. “And I’m grateful to you for saying it. I do listen to you, you know.”

Jamie took a sip of his coffee. He wiped a small trace of milk from his upper lip. “It doesn’t always seem like that to me.”

“But I do!” protested Isabel. “I listened to you over that business with Minty Auchterlonie. I listened to you very seriously.”

“You were lucky there,” said Jamie. “You could have got seriously out of your depth. But let’s not talk about the past. What are you getting involved in now?”

Over the next few minutes Isabel told him about her chance F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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meeting with Ian and about their conversation at the Scottish Arts Club. Jamie was interested—she could tell that—although he, like Isabel herself, seemed incredulous when she mentioned cellular memory.

“There’s a rational explanation for these things,” he said when she had finished talking. “There always is. And I just don’t see how anything other than brain cells could store memory. I just don’t. And that’s on the strength of my school biology course. It’s that basic.”

“But that’s exactly the problem,” retorted Isabel. “We’re all stuck with the same tried and trusted ideas. If we refused to entertain the possibility of something radically different, then we’d never make any progress—ever. We’d still be thinking that the sun revolved round the earth.”

Jamie affected surprise. “Isabel, don’t start challenging that now!”

Isabel accepted his scepticism good-naturedly. “I should point out that I’m completely agnostic on all this,” she said. “All I’m doing is trying to keep an open mind.”

“And where does this take you?” asked Jamie. “So what if the cells in the transplanted heart, or whatever, think they remember a face. So what?”

Isabel looked about her, for no reason other than that she felt a slight twinge of fear. That was in itself irrational, but she felt it.

“The face that he remembers could be the face of the driver who killed the donor,” she said. “It could have been imprinted in memory—whatever sort of memory—after he had been knocked down and the driver came and looked down at him.”

Jamie’s lip curled. “Really, 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

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Really. And if it is the face of the driver, then we may have a description of the person responsible for the death.”

Jamie thought for a moment. It was now obvious to him what Isabel had been doing in the library. “You’ve found a report of the accident?” he asked. “You know who the donor was?”

“I think so,” said Isabel. “We know that the donor was a young man. That’s as much as Ian knows. So I put two and two together and concluded that a sudden, violent death on the day on which they called Ian in for his transplant would probably supply the identity of the donor. And it has. There’s nothing bril-liant in that. It’s all pretty obvious.”

But was it? It crossed her mind that she was assuming too much, and too readily. There might have been other incidents, other young men who could have been donors, but no, Edinburgh was not a very large place. It would be unlikely that two young men had died a sudden death that night. Her assumption, she decided, was reasonable.

Rather against his better judgement, Jamie felt himself being drawn in. He could not resist Isabel, he had decided.

There was something about her that fascinated him: the intel-lectual curiosity, the style, the verve. And she was an attractive woman too. If she had been a bit younger—quite a bit younger—

then he could have imagined that she would have been every bit as exciting as Cat. Damn Cat!

“So?” he said. “So who is he? And what do we do?”

We do, he thought. I should have said you do, but once again, I’ve played straight into Isabel’s hands. I’m trapped. In nets of golden wires.

Isabel was oblivious of Jamie’s struggle with himself. She had invited him to meet her to discuss what she had found out; F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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she had not asked him to join her in her inquiry. Of course, if he wished to do so, then that would be very helpful; but she had not asked him.

“Well,” she began, “we now know who that unfortunate young man was and where he lived. We know that the police appealed for information.”

“And that’s it,” said Jamie. “We . . . you don’t know whether they ever found the driver.”

Isabel conceded that this remained unknown. But now, at least, they had a description of the person who might have been responsible.

“But what do you do with that?” asked Jamie. “Go to the police? What would you tell them? That somebody else is having visions of a face and here’s a drawing?” He laughed. “You can imagine the reception you’d get.”

Isabel thought about this. She had not imagined going to the police—just yet. Jamie was right in thinking that it would be difficult to convince them to take her seriously and that they would be unlikely to pursue the matter further; unless, of course, the push came from the family of the victim. If they could be persuaded to do something about it, then the police could hardly refuse a request from them at least to consider Ian’s story.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Jamie. “Why are you doing this, Isabel?” he asked mildly. “What’s the point?”

She looked at him. It was her duty, was it not? If this was really information about who was responsible for the hit-and-run incident, then surely she had a duty to do something about it—any citizen would have that duty simply because he or she was a citizen. And there was more to it than that. By listening to Ian’s story, she felt that she had been drawn into a moral 1 2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h relationship with him and his situation. Isabel had firm views on moral proximity and the obligations it created. We cannot choose the situations in which we become involved in this life; we are caught up in them whether we like it or not. If one encounters the need of another, because of who one happens to be, or where one happens to find oneself, and one is in a position to help, then one should do so. It was as simple as that.

She shrugged. “The point is that I have to do this,” she said.

“I can’t walk away from it. That driver needs to be called to account. And Ian needs to know why he’s seeing that face. In each case, the solution lies in the uncovering of the truth.”

Jamie looked at his watch. He had another pupil—this time one who came to his flat in Saxe-Coburg Street on the other side of town, and he would have to leave. But he still wanted to find out what the next step was. Isabel may have been incorrigi-ble in his view—and she was—but he still found everything that she did very interesting.

“What now?”

“I go and see the family,” said Isabel.

“And tell them that you know who might have been responsible for their son’s death?”

“Probably,” said Isabel. “Although I shall have to be careful about that. One never knows.”

“I’ve said it before,” warned Jamie. “Just be careful. You can’t go charging into people’s grief, you know.”

Jamie said that and then stood up. He had not intended to offend Isabel, but he had. She looked down at the table, which was of darkened pine board, with no cloth. It had been a refec-tory table somewhere, in a school perhaps, and was worn with age. She stared at it.

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Jamie reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, lightly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”

She said nothing. Jamie had made her sound like one of those people who intruded on the sorrow of others; those reporters from the gutter press who hounded the bereaved so that they could get a story or a photograph. It was not like that with her. She did not want to see these people out of curiosity; she did not want to see them at all. Did Jamie not understand that she was acting out of duty? That there were times when you just had to do that? The easiest thing to do would be to forget all about this; to tell Ian that she had been interested in his story but that she could do nothing about these visions of his. Yet that would be to ignore the fact that the family of the young man who had been killed might have a very strong desire to find out who was responsible for the incident. What might they say to her if they knew that she knew something and had not brought it to their attention?

Jamie sat down again. “Look,” he said. “I have to go. And I’m sorry that I said that. I’ll phone you soon. And I’ll help you do whatever it is that you want to do. Is that all right?”

“Yes. But you don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t, Isabel. But you seem . . . Well, let’s just leave it. We’re friends, aren’t we? You help your friends. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes I wish you were . . . a bit different, but you aren’t.” He stood up again, picking up his bassoon case as he did. “And I actually rather like you the way you are, you know?”

Isabel looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been a very good friend to me.”

He left, turning round and waving to her as he went out of 1 2 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the front door. She returned his wave and then, after treating herself to a Danish pastry and a quick cup of coffee, she left too.

Outside, at the end of George IV Bridge, where the road sloped down to the Grassmarket, a small group of tourists stood about the statue of the small Scottish terrier, Greyfriars Bobby. Isabel walked past them slowly and heard the guide intone: “This statue commemorates the loyalty of a dog who sat by his master’s grave in the Greyfriars Kirkyard for fourteen years. He never left his post.”

She saw the expression on the face of one of the members of the group as he heard this. She saw him lean forward, shaking his head in disbelief. But such loyalty did exist, and not just amongst dogs. People stuck by others for years and years, in the face of all the odds, and it should be relief, not disbelief, that one felt on witnessing it. Jamie was loyal, she thought. There he was remaining devoted to Cat, even when there was no hope. It was touching, in a way—rather like the story of Greyfriars Bobby. Perhaps there should be a statue of Jamie somewhere in Bruntsfield. This young man stood outside his former girlfriend’s delicatessen for fourteen years, the inscription might state. Isabel smiled at the ridiculous idea. One should not smile about such things, she thought, but what was the alternative? To be miserable?

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

E

SHE HAD NOT INTENDED to visit the house in Nile Grove until a few days later, but after an evening of thinking about it, she decided that she would go the next morning. It would be difficult to explain over the phone what she had in mind. That would be difficult enough to do face-to-face, but still easier, she thought.

Nile Grove was a Victorian terrace, built in honey-coloured stone that had turned light grey with the passage of time. It was an attractive street, a number of the houses having ornamenta-tion on their façades. Small, well-kept gardens separated the fronts of the houses from the street, and on many of the houses creepers, ivy or clematis, climbed up beside the high sash windows. It was an expensive street; a quiet place to live; a street untroubled by commerce or passers-by. It was not, thought Isabel, a street through which one would imagine a reckless motor-ist careering; nor one which would host the tragedy of Rory Macleod’s death.

Isabel found the house and opened the small painted ironwork gate that led to the front path. A few moments later she was standing outside the front door. There was a bell pull—one 1 2 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of the old-fashioned ones—connected to a wire that caused a tinkling sound somewhere deep inside the house, just audible from without. Isabel pulled this and then waited. She had no idea if anybody was in, and after a minute or so she felt inclined to walk back up the path and give up—with some relief—the idea of seeing the Macleod family. But then the door was suddenly opened and a woman stood before her.

Isabel looked at the woman. This was the Rose Macleod who had been mentioned in the Evening News. She was a bit older than Isabel—perhaps very late forties—and was wearing a rather shapeless shift in light blue. The face was an alert, intelligent one, a face that was immediately striking and which once would have been described as beautiful. While much of the beauty, in the conventional sense, might have been lost, there remained a quality of peacefulness and calm. This was the face of a musician, perhaps; a violinist, Isabel guessed.

“Yes? What can I do for you?” Rose Macleod’s voice was very much as Isabel had imagined it would be: quiet, with the slight burr of south Edinburgh.

“Mrs. Macleod?” Isabel asked.

Rose Macleod nodded, and smiled uncertainly at her visitor.

“My name is Isabel Dalhousie,” said Isabel. “I live round the corner—or farther down, actually. In Merchiston.” She paused.

“I suppose I’m a sort of neighbour.”

Rose Macleod smiled. “I see.” She hesitated for a moment.

Then, “Would you care to come in?”

Isabel followed her into the hall and through a door that led into a downstairs living room. It was a comfortable room, on the street side of the house, with bookshelves up one wall. It was typical, Isabel thought, of the rooms one would find in any of the houses along Nile Grove: a room which spoke to the solid, edu-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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cated taste of the neighbourhood. Above the ornate Edwardian fireplace, with its fin de siècle painted tiles, was a painting of a young man’s face in the style of Stephen Mangan—flat, almost one-dimensional, slightly haunting. A pair of Chinese bowls, famille rose, stood on the mantelpiece.

Isabel was pleased that Rose Macleod had invited her in. It seemed trusting, these days, to ask a stranger in, but it was still done in Edinburgh, or parts of Edinburgh at least. She took a seat on a small tub chair near the fireplace.

“I’m sorry to descend on you like this,” Isabel began. “We haven’t met, of course, but I know about . . . about your son. I’m so sorry.”

Rose inclined her head slightly. “Thank you. That was some months ago, as you know, but . . . but it still seems very recent.”

“Do you have other children?” asked Isabel.

Rose nodded. “We had three sons. Rory was the oldest. The other two are away at university. One in Glasgow. One in Aberdeen. Both studying engineering.” She paused, appraising Isabel with piercing blue eyes. “I lost my husband some years ago. He was an engineer too.”

There was silence. Isabel had clasped her hands together and felt the bony outline of her knuckles. Rose looked at her expectantly.

“The reason why I came to see you,” Isabel began, “is to do with the accident. I was wondering whether the police had made any progress. I saw something in the Evening News—

something in which they called for witnesses. Did anybody turn up?”

Rose looked away. “No,” she said. “Not a squeak. Nothing.

The police have said now that although the case remains technically open, it’s very unlikely that they will get anything further 1 2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h to go on.” She reached out and took a coaster from a table beside her chair and fiddled with it. “What they’re effectively saying is that we shouldn’t expect them ever to come up with an answer as to what happened. That’s more or less it.”

“That must be difficult for you,” said Isabel. “Not knowing.”

Rose put the coaster down on the table. “Of course it is. It leaves things up in the air—unresolved.” She paused and looked at Isabel again. “But, may I ask, why have you come to see me about this? Do you know something, Mrs. . . . Mrs. Dalhousie?”

“Miss,” said Isabel. “No, I don’t know anything definite, I’m afraid, but I might have some information which could have a bearing on the incident. It’s just possible.”

The effect of this on Rose was immediate. Suddenly she was tense, and she leant forward in her chair. “Please tell me what it is,” she said quietly. “Even if you think that it’s unimportant. Please tell me.”

Isabel was about to begin. She had worked out what she was going to say, which would effectively be the story of her meeting with Ian and the story that he had told her. She was not going to say much about the other case—the case which Ian had told her about—but would be prepared to say something about that if Rose appeared unduly sceptical.

She started to speak. “I met a man completely by chance . . .”

Outside the room there was the sound of a door opening.

Rose raised a hand to stop Isabel.

“Graeme,” she said. “My partner. Could you hold on a moment? I’d like him to hear what you have to say.”

She rose from the chair and opened the living-room door, which she had closed behind her when they had entered the room. Isabel heard her say something to somebody outside, and F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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then a man entered. He was a tall man, about the same age as Rose. Isabel looked at him. She saw the high brow, with the scar, and the eyes, which were hooded, markedly so. And she knew, immediately and with utter certainty, that this was the man whose face had appeared to Ian.

She took the hand which was proffered to her and shook it.

The act of introduction, the formality of the handshake, at least gave her some time to think, and her mind raced through the possibilities. She could hardly go ahead and say what she had proposed saying now that Graeme had come in. She could hardly sit there and give a description of the man on the other side of the room. Nor could she suddenly claim that she had forgotten what she was going to say.

For some inexplicable reason, Grace came to her mind, and Isabel knew what she would say. As Rose explained to Graeme that Isabel had come with some information, she refined her story. She would keep Ian out of this now, and would claim the vision herself.

“I know you’ll think this rather ridiculous,” she said. “People often do. I’m a medium, you see.”

She saw Graeme glance at Rose. He does think it’s ridiculous, thought Isabel. Good. But Rose declined his look of complicity. “I don’t think that,” she said softly. “The police have often used mediums. I’ve read about it. They can be quite useful.”

Graeme pursed his lips. He clearly did not think so. But was he anxious? Isabel wondered. If he was the hit-and-run driver, would he be anxious about some eccentric medium coming up with something which might just throw suspicion upon him?

And why, she asked, would he have left Rory in the street if he had knocked him down inadvertently? The answer occurred to her immediately. If he had been driving under the influence of 1 3 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h alcohol at the time, then running somebody over could lead to a ten-year jail sentence. Everybody knew that. Of course one would panic in such circumstances.

“Please tell us,” Rose said imploringly. “Please tell us what you’ve seen.”

Isabel studied her hands. “I saw a man driving a car down a road,” she said. “And then I saw a young man walk out in front of the car and get knocked down. The man stopped the car and got out. I saw him bending over the young man. I saw that the man in the car was shortish, slightly chubby in fact, and had fair hair. That’s what I saw.”

Isabel looked up from the study of her hands. She saw that Graeme, who had been standing when she began to talk, was now sitting down. He seemed to have relaxed, and was looking at Rose with a smile on his lips.

“You don’t believe me, Mr. . . .”

“Forbes,” he supplied. “No, please don’t be offended. I just don’t see how these things can work. I’m sorry. No disrespect intended to your . . . your calling.”

“That’s fair enough,” said Isabel, rising to her feet. “I wouldn’t wish to impose my vision on those who do not want to receive it. That’s not the way we work. Please forgive me.”

Rose was quick to get to her feet too. She took a step forward and reached out for Isabel’s hand.

“I appreciate your having come to see us,” she said. “I really do. And I can pass on what you’ve said to the police. I promise you that.”

Isabel now wanted nothing more than to leave. Graeme’s arrival had disturbed her greatly, and the subterfuge to which she had then resorted had hardly improved the situation. It was a serious matter to deceive a bereaved mother in this way, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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she felt, even if she had not had much alternative in the circumstances.

“Please don’t feel that you have to go right away,” said Rose.

“I haven’t offered you anything yet. What about a cup of tea? Or coffee?”

“You’re very kind,” said Isabel. “But I’ve taken up enough of your time already. I don’t think I should have come in the first place.”

“Of course you should have come,” Rose said quickly. “I’m glad you did, you know. I’m really glad you did.” She stopped, and then, releasing Isabel’s hand, she asked, through tears, “Did you see . . . did you see my son’s face in this dream of yours? Did he come to you?”

Isabel took a deep breath. She had intervened in the life of this woman without being asked. And now she had com-pounded the potential harm by leading her to believe that she had seen her son. What had been intended as a quick response to an unexpected development—a story designed not to be taken seriously—had touched this woman in an unexpectedly profound way.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t really see his face. He didn’t speak to me. I’m sorry.”

Graeme had now got up from his chair and had placed a protective arm round Rose’s shoulder. He glared at Isabel.

“Please leave this house,” he said, the anger rising in his voice. “Please leave now.”

I S A B E L W E N T T H AT A F T E R N OO N to Jamie’s flat in Saxe-Coburg Street. She had returned home after her visit to the house in Nile Grove, but had been unable to settle. Grace had 1 3 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sensed that something was wrong, and had asked if she was all right. Isabel would have liked to have spoken to Grace, but could not. What prevented her was embarrassment over the ridiculous claim that she had made, the claim that she was a medium. She came out of that rather badly, she thought, even if it had been a lie dreamt up to deal with a totally unexpected situation. So she reassured Grace that nothing was amiss—

another lie, although a very common one—and decided instead to see Jamie as soon as possible: that afternoon, in fact.

It was one of Jamie’s afternoons for teaching in his flat.

Isabel knew that he did not like to be disturbed while teaching, but this was an extraordinary situation that called for extraordinary action. So she crossed town on foot, walking down Dundas Street and stopping briefly at the galleries to pass the time before Jamie might be expected to be on his last pupil. There was nothing to interest her in the gallery windows, and nothing inside either; she was too uneasy to appreciate art.

On Henderson Row, groups of boys were coming out of the Edinburgh Academy, clad in their grey tweed blazers, engaged in the earnest conversation which boys seem to have in groups.

In the distance, somewhere within the school buildings, the Academy Pipe Band was practising and she stopped for a moment to listen to the drifting sound of the bagpipes. “Dark Island,” she thought; like so many Scottish tunes a haunting melody, redolent of loss and separation. Scotland had produced such fine laments, such fine accounts of sorrow and longing, whereas Ireland had been so much jauntier . . .

She continued walking, the sound of the pipes gradually becoming fainter and fainter. Saxe-Coburg Street was just round the corner from the Academy; indeed the windows at the back of Jamie’s flat gave a view down into the school’s grounds F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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and into the large skylights of the art department. One could stand there, if one wanted, and watch the senior boys painting in their life class, or the younger ones throwing clay, making the shapeless pots which would be taken back to admiring parents and consigned after a decent interval to a cupboard. She did not ring the bell at the bottom of the mutual stair, but walked up the several flights of stone stairway to Jamie’s front door. She paused there and listened. There was silence, and then a murmur of voices and the sound of a scale being played on a bassoon, hesitantly at first and then with greater speed. She looked at her watch. She had thought he might be finished by now, but she had misjudged. She decided to knock anyway, loudly, so that Jamie might hear her in the back room that he used as his studio.

He came to the door, clutching a music manuscript book.

“Isabel!”

He was surprised to see her but not discouraging.

“I’m still teaching,” he said, his voice lowered. “Come in and wait in the kitchen. I’ll be another”—he took her wrist, gently, and glanced at her watch—“another ten minutes. That’s all.”

“I wouldn’t have disturbed you,” she said as she entered the hall. “It’s just that . . .”

“Don’t worry,” he said, pointing in the direction of his studio. “Later.”

Isabel saw a boy in an Academy jacket sitting in a chair near the piano, holding a bassoon. The boy was craning his neck to see who had arrived. Isabel gave a wave and the boy, embarrassed, nodded his head. She went through to the kitchen and sat down at Jamie’s pine table. There was a copy of Woodwind magazine on the tabletop, and she paged her way idly through it.

There was an article on contrabass instruments and the illustra-1 3 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tions caught her eye. A man stood beside a contrabass saxophone, one hand supporting it, the other pointing to it in a tri-umphant gesture. It was as if he had captured a rare specimen, which the instrument appeared to be, according to the article. It had been made by a factory in Italy which was still prepared to make such large instruments, in return for—she was shocked by the price. But what a beautiful piece of construction with all its gleaming keys and rods and great leather hole pads, like inverted saucers.

Jamie stood in front of her, the boy by his side.

“That’s a real stunner, isn’t it?” he said to the boy.

Isabel looked up. The magazine was laid flat on the table and the boy was looking at the picture of the contrabass saxophone.

“Would you like one of those, John?” asked Jamie.

The boy smiled. “How do you lift it?”

“They come with stands,” said Jamie. “I know somebody who has an ordinary bass saxophone, which is slightly smaller.

He has a stand for it. A stand with wheels.” He paused. “This is Isabel Dalhousie, John. Isabel is a friend of mine. She’s quite a good pianist, you know, although she’s too modest to say much about that.”

Isabel rose to her feet and shook the boy’s hand. He was at the easily embarrassed stage and he blushed. It must be very hard, she thought, to be so in between; not a man yet, but not a little boy either. Just something in between, and struggling with bassoon lessons.

The boy left, nodding politely to Isabel. Jamie saw him out of the front door and then returned to the kitchen.

“Well,” he said. “That’s the last adolescent for the day.”

“He seems nice enough,” said Isabel.

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“I suppose he is,” said Jamie. “But he’s lazy. He doesn’t prac-tise. He says he does, but he doesn’t.”

“Ambitious parents?” asked Isabel.

“Pushy mother,” said Jamie. “Edinburgh is full of pushy mothers. And most of them send their sons to learn bassoon with me.” He smiled. “All my bills are paid by pushy mothers. I thrive on maternal push.”

He moved over to the end of the kitchen and filled a kettle with water.

“Something’s happened, hasn’t it?” He looked at her, almost dolefully. “Come on. Tell me.”

Jamie was good at detecting Isabel’s moods; he could read her, she had always thought that. And it was a slightly alarming thought, because if he could read her as well as she imagined he could, then would he have had some inkling of her feelings for him—those feelings, as she called them—which she had now got quite under control and which were not a problem any longer? She was not sure if she would want him to have known; we do not always wish for those for whom we long to know that we long for them, especially if the longing is impossible, or inappropriate. It was so easy, for instance, for a middle-aged man to fall for a young woman because of her beauty, or her litheness, or some such quality, and in most cases the response from the young woman would be one of horror, or rejection; to be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with. And so feelings should be concealed, as she had concealed her feelings from Jamie—or so she hoped.

“I went to see them,” she said simply. “I went to see those people. Rose Macleod. The mother.”

Jamie sat down at the table. He folded his arms. “And?”

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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 went to the house in Nile Grove,” Isabel said. “I spoke to the mother, who invited me in. She was a rather nice woman.

An interesting face.”

“And?”

“And I was just about to tell her about Ian’s vision of the man with the high brow and the hooded eyes when somebody arrived.”

Jamie urged her to continue. He hasn’t guessed yet, thought Isabel.

“It was her partner, her bidie-in,” she went on. “He came into the room, and I looked up and saw that he was the man whom Ian had seen. Yes. A high brow and hooded eyes. Scarred. Exactly the man I had imagined from Ian’s description.”

For a moment Jamie said nothing. He unfolded his arms, and then he looked down at the table before lifting his gaze again to fix Isabel with a stare.

“Oh no,” he said quietly. And then, even more quietly,

“Isabel.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I was stopped in my tracks, as you might imagine. So I made up some ridiculous story about being a medium and having seen the accident in my mind. It was terrible, melodramatic stuff. Ghastly. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.”

Jamie thought for a moment. “That was quite clever of you,” he said. “I’m not sure that I would have been so quick on my feet.”

“I felt pretty bad,” said Isabel. “That poor woman. It’s a pretty awful thing to do—to lie to somebody in her grief and claim to have seen the person she’s lost.”

“You didn’t set out to do that,” said Jamie. “It’s not as if F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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you’re some charlatan exploiting bereaved people. I wouldn’t think any more about that.”

Isabel looked up. “Really?”

“Yes,” said Jamie, rising to his feet to make the tea. “Really.

Your trouble, Isabel, is that you agonise too much. You worry about everything. You need to be a bit more robust. Lay off the guilt for a while.”

She made a helpless gesture. “It’s not that easy,” she said.

“Easier than you think,” said Jamie. “Look at me. I don’t worry about what I do all the time. You don’t see me plagued by guilt.”

“That may be because you haven’t done anything you feel guilty about,” countered Isabel. “Tabula rasa—a blank leaf.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Jamie. He hesitated for a moment and then he said, “I had an affair with a married woman.

Remember that? You yourself took a dim view of it.”

“That was because—” Isabel stopped herself. She had already hinted that she was jealous of Jamie’s company; she should not spell it out.

“And then I did something else,” said Jamie. “A long time ago. When I was about sixteen.”

Isabel raised a hand. “I don’t want to hear about it, Jamie,”

she said.

“All right. Let’s get back to this visit of yours. What a mess.”

“Yes,” she said. “What do I do now? If Ian’s theory is correct, then the hit-and-run driver is the mother’s partner. And I suppose it’s a theory that isn’t all that improbable. Let’s imagine that he had been driving back from a party, or from the pub, and he’s had too much to drink. He’s almost home when Rory steps out from behind a parked car and he knocks him over. He’s 1 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sober enough to realise that if the police are called—and they would of course turn up if an ambulance were summoned—he will be tested and found to be under the influence. Every driver these days knows that that means prison if you kill somebody in such a state—and a long sentence too. So he panics and drives round the corner or wherever it is that he parks. He checks the paintwork—no obvious marks. So then he goes home and pretends it never happened.”

Jamie listened carefully. “That sounds perfectly credible,”

he said once Isabel had finished. “So what now?”

“I just don’t know,” said Isabel. “It’s not very straightforward, is it?”

Jamie shrugged. “Isn’t it? Let’s say Ian’s description means anything, then all you’ve done is find out in pretty quick time that the person the police should be questioning is this man the mother’s living with. You just have to pass the information on to the police. And that will be that. You can drop out of it.”

Isabel did not agree. “But what if he’s innocent? What if Ian’s story means nothing? Imagine the impact of my intervention on their marriage, or their relationship, or whatever it is they have.”

“It’s one of your nice moral dilemmas, isn’t it?” said Jamie, smiling. “You write about them a lot in your editorials in that Review of yours, don’t you? Well, here’s one for you in real life. Very real life. I’m sorry, Isabel. You solve it. I’m a musician, not a philosopher.”

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

E

SCEPTICAL ME, thought Isabel. But one has to be, because if one were not sceptical about things like this, then one would end up believing all sorts of untenable things. The list of traps for the gullible was a long one, and seemed to grow by the day: remote healing, auras, spoon-bending, extrasensory perception.

Of course there was telepathy, which seemed to be something of an exception to these New Age enthusiasms; it had been around for so long that it had almost become respectable. So many people claimed to have had telepathic experiences—

level-headed, rational people too—that there might be something in it. And yet had not Edinburgh University’s professor of parapsychology done exhaustive tests on telepathic communication and come up with—nothing? And if groups of volunteers, hundreds of them, could sit for hours in his laboratories and try to guess what card somebody in the next room was looking at, and never get above the level of chance in their replies, then how could people insist that it was anything more than coincidence that they thought of somebody the moment before that person telephoned? Chance; pure chance. But chance was a dull explanation because it denied the possibility of the para-1 4 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h normal, and people were often disappointed by dull explana-tions. Mystery and the unknown were far more exciting because they suggested that our world was not quite as prosaic as we feared it might be. Yet we had to abjure those temptations because they lead to a world of darkness and fear.

And yet here I am, thought Isabel, walking through Char-lotte Square with Grace, bound for the spiritualist meeting rooms on Queensferry Road. It was part of her effort to be open-minded, she told herself; there had, after all, been people in Europe who had laughed at the idea of America before America was discovered by Europe. And there were people in Europe who still laughed at the idea of America; people who condescended to the New World. This infuriated her, because of the ignorance that lay behind such attitudes—on both sides. There were people in New York, or, more to the point, in places like Houston, who thought Europe—and the rest of the world—

quaint and unsanitary. And there were people in places like Paris who thought all Americans were geographically challenged xenophobes. Such narrow prejudices.

Mind you, there were at least some people in Houston who would probably find it difficult to locate Paris, or anywhere else for that matter, on a map, and who might be less than well informed about the concerns of French culture. That was indeed possible. She glanced at Grace as they walked round the south side of the square. Grace had left school at seventeen. But she had had, before that, the benefit of a traditional Scottish education, with its emphasis on learning grammar and mathematics, and geography. Would she know where Houston was? It would be interesting to know just what degree of Houston-awareness there was amongst people in general, and where Grace fitted into that. But could she ask her, directly? 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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would sound rude: one did not say to somebody out of the blue, Where’s Houston? (Unless, of course, one was actively looking for it at the time.)

These were her thoughts when a heavily built man in a lightweight jacket, accompanied by a woman in a beige trouser suit, stepped up to them. The man extracted a folded map from the pocket of his jacket. Isabel noticed the fairness of his skin and the sun spots on the brow below the hairline.

“Excuse me?” he said. “We’re looking for the National Gallery, and I think . . .”

Isabel smiled at him. “You’re not far away,” she said. “You can reach it if you walk along Princes Street, which is just down there.”

She took the map from him and showed him where they were. Then she looked up. She had an ear for accents. “Texas?”

she asked. “Louisiana?”

His smile was warm. “Houston,” he said.

Isabel returned the map to him and wished them a successful trip. She and Grace began to cross the road.

“Houston, Grace,” said Isabel conversationally.

“I’ve never been there,” said Grace. “I went to Detroit once to see an aunt of mine who went to live out there.”

Isabel could not resist the temptation. “Some distance apart, aren’t they?” she said. “Such a big country. Houston and Detroit.”

“Depends on how you travel,” said Grace.

Isabel did not give up. “I sometimes get Houston mixed up,”

she said. “All these places. I get a bit confused.”

“Look at a map,” replied Grace helpfully. “It’ll show you where Houston is.”

Isabel was silent as they walked down the narrow lane that 1 4 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h led past West Register House to Queensferry Road. It had been an extraordinary coincidence that she should have thought of Houston, of all places, at precisely the moment that the visitor from Houston was about to ask directions. And it was unnerving, too, that this had all taken place in the context of thoughts about telepathy, and, to add to the strangeness of the situation, while she was on her way, as Grace’s guest, to a séance at the spiritualist meeting rooms, where they would presumably love to hear about such a thing.

They reached Queensferry Road, and Grace pointed to a building on the corner. “That’s the place,” she said. “On the third floor there.”

Isabel looked at the building on the corner of the road. It formed the end of an elegant terrace of grey stone, classical and restrained as all buildings were in the great sweep of the Georgian New Town. On the ground floor there were shop windows: a jeweller, with a display of silver, and a newsagent displaying the Scotsman’s blue thistle motif. It could have been any office building; nothing indicated that it was anything different.

They crossed Queensferry Road and entered through the blue door. A stone staircase led from a small entrance hall up to the floors above. The stairs themselves were worn, indented where feet had trodden on the stone for over two hundred years, gradually wearing it down.

“We’re at the top,” said Grace. “We’ve had trouble with this building, by the way. Lead pipes—everything had to be replaced.”

Isabel sympathised. It was all very well living in an aged city, but the pleasure came with a large bill attached to it in the form of maintenance costs. And even the spiritualists would F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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have to bear the burden of those; no help could come from the other side.

They made their way up to the top of the stairs. As they ascended, a man came down, a man in a brown felt hat. He nodded to Grace as he passed them on the stairs and she returned the greeting.

“He lived all his life with his mother,” Grace whispered, once the man was out of earshot. “She crossed over a few months ago, and now he’s trying to get information from her about some bank accounts. He doesn’t know where the bank accounts were kept.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what this is meant to be about.

We’re not meant to get that sort of information. People on the other side are above all that. They give us messages about how to live our lives—useful things like that.”

Isabel was about to say that she thought that it would be very useful to know where bank accounts were, but stopped herself. She said instead, “He must be lonely.”

“He is,” said Grace.

They came to an open door on the top landing and went into the hall beyond. It had been an ordinary flat, Isabel thought—a house with the ordinary family rooms, not built as a place of pilgrimage or seeking, but now just that to the handful of people she could see seated in the meeting room beyond.

Grace pointed through another doorway which gave off the hall. “The library,” she said. “One of the best collections of books on the subject in the whole country.”

Isabel glanced at the wall of books. These were books about those things that could not be seen or touched, but in that respect they were probably no different from books about pure mathematics. She made an appreciative but noncommittal sound.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace now led the way into the meeting room, a large room with, at one end, a fireplace in front of which a platform and podium stood. Beside the podium was an easy chair and a table with an arrangement of flowers. A rather angular-looking woman, of about Isabel’s age, was sitting in the easy chair, her hands resting on her lap. She was gazing up at the ceiling, although as Grace and Isabel entered, her glance rested briefly, appraisingly, upon them. In the body of the room, rows of chairs had been set out in ranks. Grace pointed to seats near the back.

“The best place to see what’s going on,” she said.

Once seated, Isabel looked about her, discreetly. There was always a certain awkwardness, she felt, in the witnessing of the religious—or spiritual—rituals of others. It was rather like being an outsider at a family party, a Protestant in St. Peter’s Basilica, a Gentile at the Wailing Wall. One might sense the mystery, and understand its value for others, but one could not share it. Each of us is born into our own mysteries, thought Isabel, gazing at the flowers and then at the impassive face of the medium, but the mystery of another might just take us in and embrace us. And then what a sense of homecoming, of belonging!

A man entered the room and took a seat immediately behind them. He leant forward and whispered something to Grace, who smiled and said something in reply that Isabel did not hear. Isabel noticed his coat, which he had not taken off and which was an expensive one. She saw his regular profile and his head of thick hair. He looked to all intents and purposes like . . .

like what? she wondered. An accountant or bank manager?

Somebody with a certain assurance about him.

She noticed that the medium had transferred her gaze from 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 ceiling and was looking at the man seated behind them. It was not a stare, but a gaze which moved on to somebody else, and then came back to him.

A man in a dark suit walked up the aisle between the rows of chairs and mounted the platform. He nodded to the medium and turned to face the thirty or so people who were now seated in the room. “My friends,” he began, “you are welcome. Whether you are a stranger or a member of this body, you are welcome.”

Isabel listened closely. The accent was Hebridean, she thought; a lilting voice from the islands. She noticed his suit, which was one of those black ill-fitting suits that Scottish crofters wore on Sundays, and she remembered, suddenly, how once as a young woman she had been on the island of Skye—was it with John Liamor? yes, it was—and they had driven past a croft house, low and white-painted, surrounded by fields and with a line of hills in the distance, and had seen a suit like that, freshly washed, hanging out to dry on the clothesline before the house. And the wind had been in the arms and legs of the suit and had given it life.

A few announcements were made, and then the man introduced the medium. He did not give a surname; she was just Anna. And then he stepped down from the podium and sat down in the front row.

The medium stood up. She looked at the people in the room and smiled. Her hands were clasped loosely in front of her, and now she opened them in a gesture of supplication. She closed her eyes, her head lifted up. “Let us each dwell on our thoughts,”

she said. “Let us open our hearts to the world of spirit.”

They sat in silence for ten minutes, or more. Eventually the medium spoke 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

“I have somebody here,” she said, so quietly that Isabel had to strain to hear the words. “I have somebody here. There is a child coming through.”

Isabel saw a woman in front of her stiffen, and she knew from this the nature of her loss. Such pain.

The medium opened her eyes. “Yes, there is a child coming through and she is saying something to me . . .”

The woman in the row in front leant forward and the medium’s gaze fell upon her.

“It is you, my dear, isn’t it?” said the medium. “It is for you, isn’t it?”

The woman nodded silently. Another woman seated near her reached out and touched her gently on the shoulder.

The medium took a step forward. “My dear, there is a little girl who says that she is with you and watching over you. She says that her love will always be with you and around you . . . around you every moment until you join her. She says you are to be brave. Yes, that’s what she says. She says that you are to be brave. Which you are, she says. She says that you have always been brave.”

“It’s a little boy she lost,” whispered Grace. “But sometimes they can’t see very well into the other side. It’s easy to get little boys and little girls mixed up.”

“Now,” said the medium, “I pass to another person in spirit who is coming to me. Yes, this person is saying very clearly to me that there is somebody in this room who has not forgiven him for what he did. That is what he is saying. This person says that he is very sorry for what he did and begs this other person on this side to forgive him. It is not too late to forgive, even now.”

She looked out over the rows of seats. A woman at the end of the second row had risen to her feet. “This message might be F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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for me,” she said, her voice uneven. “I think that it might be for me.”

The medium turned to face her. “I think it is, my dear. Yes, I think it is for you.” She paused. “And do you have that forgiveness in your heart? Can I tell this person in spirit that he has your forgiveness? Can I tell him that?”

The woman who had been standing up suddenly sank back into her seat. She put her hands up to her face and covered her eyes. She was sobbing. A woman behind her reached forward to comfort her.

The medium said nothing. When the woman’s sobbing had subsided, she sat down again and looked up at the ceiling, and did so for a good fifteen minutes. She rose to her feet and looked about the room, her gaze alighting on the man behind Grace.

“I have somebody coming through for you,” she said. “I have somebody here. Yes. This is your wife. She is here. She is with me. She is with you. Can you sense her presence?”

Isabel did not like to turn and stare, but did so anyway, discreetly. The man’s eyes were fixed on the medium; he was listening intently. In response to her question he nodded.

“Good,” said the medium. “She is coming through very strongly now. She says that she is still with you. She . . .” The medium hesitated, and frowned. “She is concerned for you. She is concerned that there is one who is trying to get to know you better. She is concerned that this person is not the right person for you. That is what she says.”

The relaying of this message had its effect on the room, and there were whispers. One or two people turned round and looked in the direction of the man to whom it was directed.

Others looked firmly ahead at the medium. Isabel glanced at 1 4 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace, who was looking down at the floor and who seemed hunched up, as if hoping for the moment of embarrassment around her to pass.

There was little more after that. The world of spirit, momentarily goaded into action by the medium, must have been exhausted, and after a few minutes the medium declared that she had finished her communication with the other side.

Now it was time for tea, and they all withdrew to a cheerfully furnished room next to the library. There were plates of biscuits and cups of strong, warm tea.

“Very interesting,” whispered Isabel. “Thank you, Grace.”

Grace nodded. She seemed preoccupied, though, and did not say anything as she helped Isabel to a cup of tea and a biscuit. Isabel looked about her. She saw the medium standing at the side of the room. She was sipping at a cup of tea and talking to the man who had introduced her, the man in the black suit.

But as she talked, Isabel saw her eyes move about the room, as if seeking somebody out. And they fixed on the man who had been seated behind her, the man who had received the message from his wife. Isabel looked at the medium’s expression, and at her eyes in particular. It was very clear to her, as it would be clear, she thought, to any woman. She had seen enough.

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

E

WHAT’S IT LIKE?” Ian asked. “I know it may sound like a rather simple question, naïve perhaps, but what’s it like—being a philosopher?”

Isabel looked out of the window. It was mid-morning and they were sitting in her study, the tang of freshly brewed coffee in the air. Outside, on the corners of her lawn, the weeds had begun to make their presence increasingly obvious. She needed several hours, she thought, several hours which she would never find, for digging and raking. One must cultivate one’s garden, said Voltaire; and there, he said, is happiness to be found rather than in philosophising. She thought for a moment of the juxtaposition of philosophy and the everyday: zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance had been an inspired combination for its moment, but there might be others, as novel and surprising. “Voltaire and the control of weeds,” she muttered.

“Voltaire and . . . ?” asked Ian.

“Just musing,” said Isabel. “But in answer to your question: It’s much the same as being anything else. You carry your profession with you, I suppose, in much the same way as a doctor 1 5 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h or, I should imagine, a psychologist does. You see the world in a particular way, don’t you? As a psychologist?”

Ian followed her gaze out into the garden. “To an extent,” he said, but sounded doubtful. “Being a philosopher, though, must be rather different from being anything else. You must think about everything. You must spend your time pondering over what things mean. A somewhat higher realm than the rest of us inhabit.”

Isabel drew herself away from the lawn. She had been thinking about weeds. But weeds, and what to do about them, were very much a part of everyday life, and everyday life was exactly what philosophy was about. We were rooted in it, inevitably, and how we reacted to it—our customs, our obser-vances—was the very stuff of moral philosophy. Hume had called them, these little conventions, a kind of lesser morality, and in her view he had been right.

“It’s much more mundane and everyday than you would imagine,” she began. And then she stopped. One could easily simplify too much, and discussions about social convention could give him the wrong idea. How you drank your coffee was not what it was about, but the fact that you drank coffee together was of tremendous significance. But she could not say that, because that statement could be made only after a great deal of earlier ground had been covered and understood.

Ian nodded. “I see. Well, that’s a little bit disappointing. I imagined that you spent all your time pacing about trying to work out the nature of reality—wondering whether the world outside is real enough to take a walk in. That sort of thing.”

Isabel laughed. “Sorry to disabuse you of such amusing notions. No. But I must admit that my calling—if I can call it that—sometimes makes life a little difficult for me.”

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This interested him. “In what way?”

“Well, it’s mostly a question of duty,” Isabel said. She sighed, thinking of her demons; moral obligation was the real problem. This was the cross she bore, the rack on which she was obliged to lie—even the metaphors were uncomfortable.

“I find myself thinking very carefully about what I should do in any given situation,” she went on. “And it can get a little bit burdensome for me. In fact, sometimes I feel rather like those unfortunate people with OCD—you know, obsessive-compulsive disorder; of course you know that, you’re a clinical psychologist—but I sometimes think I’m like those people who have to check ten times that they’ve turned the oven off or who have to wash their hands again and again to get rid of germs. I think I can understand how they feel.”

“Now you’re on familiar ground,” he said. “I had quite a few patients with OCD. One woman I knew had a thing about doorhandles. She had to cover the doorhandle with a handker-chief before she could open it. Tricky, sometimes. And public washrooms were a real agony for her. She had to use her foot to flush. She lifted a foot and pushed the lever down by stepping on it.”

Isabel thought for a moment. “Very wise,” she said with a smile. “Imagine what results you’d get if you took a swab from one of those handles and cultured it. Imagine.”

“Maybe,” said Ian. “But we need to be exposed to germs, don’t we? All this hygiene and refined foods—what’s the result?

Allergies galore. Everyone will eventually have asthma.” He paused. “But back to philosophy. Those papers over there—are they submissions for that journal of yours?”

Isabel glanced at the pile of manuscripts and suppressed a shudder. Guilt, she thought, can sometimes be measured in 1 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h physical quantities. A heavy drinker might measure his guilt in gallons or litres; a glutton in inches round the waist; and the editor of a journal in terms of the height of the stack of manuscripts awaiting her attention. This was almost eighteen inches of guilt.

“I should be reading those,” she said. “And I will. But, as Saint Augustine said about chastity, not just yet.”

“You don’t want to read them?” Ian asked.

“I do and I don’t,” said Isabel. “I don’t want to read them in one sense, but in another sense I want to read them and get them finished.” She looked again at the pile. “Most of those are for a special issue we’re bringing out. It’s on friendship.”

Ian looked puzzled. “What has philosophy got to do with that?” he asked.

“A great deal,” Isabel replied. “It’s one of the great topics.

What is the nature of friendship? How are we to treat our friends? Can we prefer our friends to others who are not our friends?”

“Of course we can,” said Ian. “Isn’t that why they’re our friends in the first place?”

Isabel shook her head. She arose from her chair and went to stand by the window, looking out on the lawn, but averting her gaze from the weeds. Weeds had a closer relationship with guilt than did grass.

“There are some philosophers who say that we shouldn’t do that at all,” she said. “They say that we have a moral duty to treat others equally. We shouldn’t discriminate among people who need our help. We should allocate such help as we can give absolutely even-handedly.”

“But that’s inhuman!” Ian protested.

“I think so,” said Isabel. “But it’s not all that easy to make a sound case for preferring the claims of your friends. I think F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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one can do it, but you’re up against some powerful counter-arguments.”

“Do philosophers tend to have many friends?” asked Ian. “If that’s the way they think . . .”

“It depends on the extent to which they possess the virtues that make friendship thrive,” Isabel answered. “A virtuous person will have friends in the true sense. A person whose character is afflicted with vices won’t.”

She turned away from the window and faced Ian. “We can return to this topic, if you like, Ian, but I’m afraid this is not why I invited you for coffee today. It’s something else altogether—”

“I can guess,” he interrupted. “You’ve been thinking about what I said to you.”

“Yes. I have. And I’ve been acting on it, too.”

He looked at her anxiously. “I hadn’t intended to draw you in,” he began. “I didn’t imagine that—”

“Of course you didn’t,” she interjected. “But you may recall that I said something about obligation earlier on. One of the consequences of being a philosopher is that you get involved.

You ask yourself whether you need to do something and so often the answer comes up yes, you do.” She paused for a moment. It occurred to her that she should be careful not to make Ian feel stressed. Presumably he had to avoid stress, and shock, too.

“I’ve traced the family of your donor. It wasn’t hard. You could have done it, if you thought about it.”

“I didn’t have the courage,” he said. “I wanted to thank them but . . .”

“And I’ve found your man,” Isabel continued. “The man with the high forehead and the hooded eyes. I’ve found him for you.”

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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 was silent; sitting there in his chair, staring at Isabel, completely taken aback, quite silent. Eventually he cleared his throat. “Well, I’m not sure if I was looking forward to that. But I suppose . . . Well, I suppose that if I don’t do something about this, I’m not really going to give myself much of a chance, am I?

I told you earlier on that I thought this thing would kill me—

this sadness, this dread, whatever we call it. I think it’ll prevent the new heart from . . . from taking, so to speak.” He looked at her, and she saw the anguish in his eyes. “Maybe it’s best to know,” he said. “Do you think so?”

“Maybe,” said Isabel. “But remember, there are some things which we would probably prefer not to know once we’ve found them out. This may be one of them.”

He looked confused. “I don’t see how—”

Isabel raised a hand to stop him. “You see, the difficulty is that this man—the man who looks so like the man of your . . .

your imaginings—lives with the mother of the young man who was the donor.”

He frowned slightly, taking in the information. “How did he die?” he asked. “Did you find out?”

“A hit-and-run accident,” she said. “Still unsolved. It was very close to the house. He was knocked over and he died shortly thereafter in hospital. He was unconscious when they found him, which meant that he was unable to say anything about what happened. But . . .”

“But,” he said, “but he could have been conscious immediately after being knocked over, and the driver could have bent over him and looked at him?”

“Exactly,” said Isabel.

For a few minutes nothing further was said by either of them. Isabel turned away again and looked out into the garden, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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oblivious now of the weeds, thinking only of the dilemma which she had created for herself and from which there seemed no easy, painless escape. Unless she handed it over to Ian, though he had done nothing to bring the situation about in the first place—other than to tell her about what had happened.

Ian’s voice broke the silence. “Does she know?” he asked.

“Know what?” Isabel had not told him that she had been unable to speak about his vision. “I didn’t tell her about you,”

she said. “I couldn’t. He was there.”

“No,” said Ian. “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, does the mother of the donor know that this man could have been the hit-and-run driver?”

The question surprised Isabel. She had not thought about that, but it was an obvious possibility. She had assumed that she did not, but what if she did? That put a very different complexion on the matter.

“If she knows, then she’d be sheltering the person who killed her son,” she said. “Would any mother do that, do you think?”

Ian thought for a moment before giving his answer. “Yes,” he said. “Many would. These domestic killings that occur from time to time—the woman often shelters the man. A violent partner harms one of the children. The woman stays silent. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of helplessness. Perhaps out of misplaced loyalty. It’s not uncommon.”

Isabel thought back to her conversation with Rose Macleod. She remembered her expression of eagerness when Isabel had revealed that she might have some information on the incident. That had not been feigned, she thought. Nor was she mis-taken about the man’s anxiety, shown in the tension of his body language when she had broached the subject—a tension which 1 5 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had visibly dissipated when she had come up with a description of the driver which so clearly excluded him.

“I’m sure that she doesn’t know,” she said. “I really think she doesn’t.”

“Very well,” Ian said. “She doesn’t know. Now what?”

Isabel laughed. “Precisely. Now what?”

“We can go to the police,” Ian said quietly. “We can just hand the thing over.”

“Which will lead to nothing happening,” said Isabel. “The police aren’t going to go and accuse him of being the driver on the basis of what they will probably call a dream.”

She saw that he agreed with this, and she continued, “So the issue now is whether we have a duty to go and inform that woman that the man with whom she lives was possibly the hit-and-run driver who killed her son. Just possibly, note. The whole argument is based, after all, on the pretty shaky premise that your vision has anything to do with anything. A very shaky premise.

“But let’s say that we believe it may be relevant information.

Let’s say that the mother takes the same view and believes it, even if it can’t be proved. What we will have succeeded in doing then will be to have introduced an awful, corrosive doubt into her life. We might effectively destroy her relationship with that man. And so she will have lost not only her son, but her man as well.”

When Ian spoke, his tone was resigned. He sounded tired.

“In which case we keep quiet.”

“We can’t,” said Isabel. She did not explain why she said this, as she had noticed Ian’s weariness and she was concerned not to tire him. It was to do with formal justice, and the duty 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 one has to the community at large not to allow people like drunken drivers—if he had been drunk—to go unpunished if they cause death on the road. That was profoundly important, and outweighed any consideration of the emotional happiness of one unfortunate woman. It was a hard decision, but one which Isabel now seemed to be seeing her way to reaching. But even as she reached it, she thought how much easier it would be to walk away from this, to say that the business of others was no business of hers. That, of course, required one to believe that we are all strangers to one another—which was just not true, in Isabel’s view, indeed it was as alien to her as it had been to John Donne when he wrote those echoing, haunting words about islands and community. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, he had said. Yes. It is.

But even if she had reached the view that considerations of community and moral duty obliged them to act, she still had no idea what form this action should take. It was a curious, slightly disconcerting state to be in: to know that one should act, but not knowing how. It was rather like being in a phoney war, before the bombs and bullets are exchanged.

I N CAT ’ S D E L I CAT E S S E N, to which Isabel now made her way, Eddie was creating a small stack of tubs of Patum Peperium, an anchovy paste, on the counter, alongside a display of socially responsible chocolate bars. It was a quiet spell and there was only one customer, a well-dressed man looking at oatcakes and having inordinate difficulty in choosing between two brands. Eddie, watching him, caught Cat’s eye and shrugged.

Cat smiled and crossed the floor to offer him advice.

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

“That brand on the left has less salt than the one on the right,” she offered. “Otherwise I think they taste very much the same.”

The man turned round and looked at her anxiously. “What I’m really looking for,” he said, “is a triangular oatcake. That’s the shape that oatcakes should be, you know. Triangular, but with one side a bit rounded. Oatcake shaped.”

Cat picked up a box of oatcakes and inspected it. “These are round,” she said. “And those other ones are round, too. I’m sorry.

We only seem to have round oatcakes.”

“They still make them, though,” said the man, fingering the cuffs of his expensive cashmere jacket. “You could get them, couldn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Cat. “We could get hold of triangular oatcakes.

Nobody has particularly asked . . .”

The man sighed. “You may think it’s ridiculous,” he said.

“But it’s just that there are so few things in this world which are authentic. Local. Little things—like the shape of oatcakes—are very important. It’s nice to have these familiar things about one.

There are so many people who want to make things the same.

They want to take our Scottish things away from us.”

The poignancy of his words struck Cat. It was true, she thought—a small country like Scotland had to make an effort to keep control of its everyday life. And she could see how it could be upsetting, if one felt at all vulnerable, to see familiar Scottish things taken away from you.

“They’ve taken away so many of our banks,” said the man.

“Look what happened to our banks. They’ve taken our Scottish regiments. They want to take away everything that’s distinctive.”

Cat smiled. “But they’ve given us back our Parliament,” she said. “We’ve got that, haven’t we?”

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The man thought. “Maybe,” he said. “But what can it do?

Legislate for triangular oatcakes?”

He laughed, and Cat laughed too, with relief. She had been thinking him a crank, but cranks never laughed at themselves.

“I’ll try to get hold of some triangular oatcakes,” she said.

“Can you give me a week or two? I’ll ask our suppliers.”

He thanked her and left the shop, and Cat went back to the counter. Eddie, having finished creating his carefully balanced stack of Patum Peperium, turned round. He saw Isabel outside, at the door, and called Cat.

“Isabel’s here,” he said. “Outside. Coming in.”

Cat greeted her aunt. “I’ve just had a wonderful conversation about oatcakes and cultural identity,” she said. “You would have loved it.”

Isabel nodded vaguely. She did not want to talk about oatcakes; she wanted to sit quietly with a cup of coffee and one of Cat’s Continental newspapers— Le Monde, perhaps. It never seemed to matter quite so much if foreign newspapers were out of date; yesterday’s Scotsman rapidly began to seem stale, but a newspaper in a foreign language remained engaging. Le Monde had been taken by somebody, but there was a three-day-old copy of Corriere della Sera which she appropriated and took with her to a table.

“Do you mind, Cat?” she said. “Sometimes one wants to talk. Sometimes one wants to think or”—she flourished the paper in the air—“read this.”

Cat understood, and busied herself with a task in the back office while Eddie prepared a cup of coffee for Isabel. Once that was ready he took it across to her table and placed it before her. Isabel looked up from her paper and smiled encouragingly at Eddie. Her week of running the delicatessen had cemented 1 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the friendship between them, but it was a friendship that relied more on smiles and gestures than on the exchange of ideas and confidences. At the end of her time there, Isabel had felt that she now knew him rather better, although he had told her nothing about himself. Where did Eddie live? She had asked him outright, and he had simply said on the south side, which was half the city, more or less, and gave nothing away. Did he live by himself, or did he stay at home? At home, he answered, but had not volunteered anything about who else was there. Isabel had left it at that; one had to respect the privacy of people. Some people did not like others to know about their domestic circumstances—out of shame, Isabel assumed. For a young man of Eddie’s age to be living at home was not all that unusual, but he may have thought that perhaps it reflected badly on him never to have left. I live at home, thought Isabel, suddenly. I live in the house to which I was taken from the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion by my sainted American mother. I haven’t gone very far.

She would find out more about Eddie in future, she felt.

And then she might be able to do something for him. If he wanted to take a course somewhere, Telford College perhaps, then she could pay for it—if he would accept. She already supported two students at the University of Edinburgh through her private charitable trust. Not that they knew, of course; they thought it came from Simon Macintosh, her lawyer, which it did in so far as he administered it, but the real purse from which it was drawn was Isabel’s.

She thanked Eddie for the coffee and he beamed at her.

“Did that Italian phone you yet?” he asked.

Isabel looked at him blankly. “Italian?”

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“Tomasso. He was in here earlier today. He asked Cat for your telephone number.”

Isabel glanced down at her coffee. “No,” she said. “He hasn’t phoned.”

She felt strangely agitated. She had offered to show him round the city—that was all—but the prospect of his getting in touch with her had an unexpected effect on her.

Eddie bent forward. “Cat’s giving him no encouragement,”

he whispered. “I don’t think that she thinks much of him.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she doesn’t want him to feel that there’s more to it than friendship,” she said.

“I feel sorry for him,” said Eddie. “To come over all the way from Italy to see her and then this.”

Isabel smiled. “I suspect that he can look after himself,” she said. “He doesn’t strike me as being the vulnerable type.”

Eddie nodded. “Maybe,” he said.

He moved away. It was the longest conversation that Isabel had ever had with him, and she was surprised by the fact that Eddie had picked up on Cat’s attitude towards Tomasso. She had assumed that he would be indifferent to such matters, but now she realised that this might be a serious underestimation of the young man’s powers of observation. And of his inner life too, she thought. We ignore quiet people, the shy observers, the bystanders; we forget that they are watching.

She returned to her perusal of the Corriere della Sera, but it was difficult for her to concentrate. She thought of Tomasso, and of when she might expect his call. She wondered what he would want to do in Edinburgh. There were museums and galleries, of course; all the usual sites of Scottish history, but she was not sure whether that would be what he wanted. Perhaps 1 6 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he would want to go out to dinner somewhere; she could arrange that. Cat would not come, presumably, and it would just be the two of them. What would Tomasso eat? He would not be a vegetarian, she thought: Italians were not vegetarians. They drank, they womanised, they sang; oh, blissful race of heroes!

She looked at the paper and struggled with a review of a book about suppressed photographs of Mussolini. Il Duce, apparently, took a strong interest in his appearance in photographs—

well, she thought, he was an Italian dictator, and if Italian dictators aren’t stylish, then which dictators would be? The paper showed a few samples. Mussolini on a horse, looking ridiculous, like a sack of potatoes, or spaghetti perhaps. Mussolini with a group of nuns flocking around him like excited sparrows. (He did not like to be in the same photograph as nuns or clerics of any sort; and why was that? Isabel asked herself.

Guilt, of course.) Mussolini dressed as an aviator, with white jacket and white flying helmet, in an open cockpit aeroplane—

he pretended to be able to fly while the plane was actually con-trolled by a real pilot, crouching on the floor. And when he entered the lion cage at Rome Zoo, a splendid show of public bravado, the lions had been drugged; they would have had no appetite that day for a stout dictator! She smiled as she read the review. What a distance now stood between those days and these; ancient history to so many people, but just one generation, really, and did not Italy still come up with flashy, vain politicians who were often on the wrong side of the law? And yet how could one not love Italy and the Italians; they were so very human, built such gorgeous cities, and made such good, loyal friends. If one had to choose a nationality, in the anteroom of birth, would it not be tempting to choose to be an Italian? Isabel thought it would be, although the options might all be taken up F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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before it was one’s turn and the grim news would be given: We’re sorry, but you’re going to have to be something else.

What, she wondered, would be the most difficult identity to bear? Probably that of being something in the wrong place—

one of those obscure minorities in some distant republic where all hands, and hearts, were turned against one.

So absorbed was Isabel in these ruminations that she did not notice the other tables in the delicatessen filling up. When she lowered the paper and reached for her cup of coffee, now cold from neglect, she saw that a number of people had entered the shop. Cat was at the counter attending to customers, and Eddie was hunched over the coffee machine in the background.

Isabel looked at the new arrivals and immediately froze. Two tables away, near the large basket of baguettes, were Rose Macleod and her partner, Graeme. They had both been served coffee by Eddie and were talking to one another. Graeme had in his hand a list which he showed to Rose, who nodded.

Isabel did not want to see them. Her embarrassment over her encounter with them was still fresh in her mind, and she did not imagine that they would particularly want to see her.

She quickly looked down again at her paper. If she sat there, absorbed in the news from Italy, they might not notice and they would eventually go away. But what if Cat came over to speak to her, or Eddie topped up her coffee? That would draw attention to her.

She tried to concentrate on the newspaper, but could not.

After reading the same sentence three times, the meaning jum-bled in her mind, she sneaked a glance at the other table, and looked directly into Rose’s stare. Now she could not very well look away, and so she began to force a smile of recognition. The other woman was clearly shocked by the encounter; she smiled 1 6 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h too, hesitantly, raised a hand in a gesture of greeting, and then dropped it again as if uncertain that it had been the right thing to do.

Isabel lowered her eyes to the paper again. She felt calmer; they had met, greeted one another after a fashion, and that would be that—they could go their separate ways. She thought, though, that if she had had the courage she would have walked across to the couple’s table and told Rose that she had misled her. Then she might have made a confession as to why she had come to see her in the first place. She could have given them the full facts, related Ian’s extraordinary experiences, and left it up to them to decide what to do about them. And if there were any remaining public duty, she could have encouraged Ian to contact the police and tell them too. And that would have been the end of the whole affair. But she did not do this, and thus remained enmeshed in a situation which was causing her grow-ing moral discomfort.

She looked again at the couple. Graeme was leaning forward and saying something to Rose, something urgent and angry. Rose was listening, but shaking her head. Graeme’s manner seemed to become more animated. She saw him lay a finger on the tabletop and move it up and down in a fussy, insistent way, as if emphasising a point. Then he turned and looked in Isabel’s direction, and she saw a look of pure malevo-lence directed at her. Meeting his gaze was like being assaulted physically—a tidal wave of dislike and contempt, moving across the room and crushing her.

He stood up, reached for his coat, and walked away from the table. Rose watched him leave. She almost got to her feet, but then sank back into her chair. Once he was out of the door, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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she reached for her cup of coffee, picked it up, and made her way over to Isabel’s table.

“Do you mind?” Rose asked. “Do you mind my joining you?”

She put down her cup alongside the Corriere della Sera. “You do remember me, don’t you? Rose Macleod. You came to my house.”

Isabel indicated the empty chair. “Please sit down. Of course I remember you. I wanted to say how sorry . . .”

Rose cut her off. “Please,” she said. “I’m the one who should be sorry about what happened. Graeme was very short with you when you came to the house. He shouldn’t have said what he did. I was very cross with him.”

Isabel had not expected this. “He had every right to be angry with me,” she said. “I barged into your house like that and told you something that, well, was just not true.”

Rose frowned. Isabel noticed the high cheekbones and the delicacy of her features. She was an even more attractive woman than she had appeared to be when Isabel had seen her first. There was a particular delicacy in her face, a sorrow perhaps. The sorrowing face is, in a way, a calm face. There is no complexity and change: just one constant emotion.

“Not true?” Rose asked.

Isabel sighed. “I’m not a medium,” she said. “That was utter nonsense. I had intended to say something quite different to you, and then I panicked and made up that ridiculous story.”

She paused. She could see that her disclosure was not being well received.

“Then why did you say . . .” Rose could not continue. Her disappointment was written on her face.

Isabel reached a decision. The whole ridiculous situation 1 6 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h needed to be resolved. She had to get back to truth and rationality and put an end to this absurd dalliance with the paranor-mal. “I’m going to have to tell you a rather odd story,” she said.

“I don’t come out of it very well, I’m afraid, but I suppose I might say in my defence that I was well intentioned.”

Rose looked at her. Her disappointment now seemed to be turning to distrust. “I’m not sure,” she began. She made as if to get up, but Isabel put out a hand to stop her.

“Please listen,” she said. “I know it might sound unlikely to you, but please hear me out.”

Rose sat back. “All right,” she said coldly. “Tell me whatever it is that you want to say.”

“It began right there,” Isabel said, pointing to a nearby table.

“I was looking after this place while my niece was away. I found myself talking to a man who came in for his lunch. He told me that he had recently been given a heart transplant.” She paused, waiting to see whether the mention of the heart transplant had any effect on Rose. But Rose remained impassive.

“I met him on another occasion,” she said. “He’s a perfectly rational man. Very level-headed and sane—a clinical psychologist, in fact. He spoke to me about the effects of the operation, and one of these was a rather unexpected one.”

Rose, who had been listening courteously, now shrugged. “I don’t know what this has got to do with my son. Frankly, I don’t see where this is going.”

Isabel looked at her in surprise. “But your son was the donor,” she said. “This man I spoke to has his heart.”

The effect of this on Rose was immediate. “I think that you’ve made some fundamental mistake,” she said. “I don’t know why you think this has anything to do with us. Why do you F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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say that my son was the donor? What on earth are you talking about?”

For a moment Isabel was too confused to say anything.

Then, with Rose looking at her in slightly irritated puzzlement, she continued, “Your son was the heart donor. They transplanted his heart into Ian. They took it over to Glasgow.”

“My son was not a donor of anything,” said Rose hotly. “I think that you’ve got things rather badly mixed up, Miss . . . Dalhousie, was it?”

In her confusion, all that Isabel could manage was a lame

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” said Rose, her irritation coming to the surface. “If my son had been a donor, they would have asked us, wouldn’t they? Nobody told us anything about all this. Nobody . . .” She struggled with the words that followed. “Nobody took his heart.”

For a few minutes neither of them said anything. Rose looked at Isabel reproachfully, and Isabel looked down at the table.

“I’ve obviously made a very bad mistake,” she said after a while, her voice tentative and uneven. “I shouldn’t have leapt to conclusions. I really do apologise to you for causing you this obvious distress. I had . . . I had no idea.”

Rose sighed. “There’s no real harm done,” she said. But she did not intend to leave it at that. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to set your friend right on this. We have nothing to do with his operation—nothing. This doesn’t concern us at all.”

Isabel nodded miserably. “I feel very bad about this,” she said. “I barged in without checking to see what sort of ground I was standing on.”

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“Let’s just forget all about it,” said Rose. “There’s been a bit of confusion—that’s all.”

There was nothing more for them to say to each other.

Mutely, Rose got up, nodded to Isabel, and then walked out of the delicatessen. She did not turn round; she did not bother to look. And Isabel, folding up her paper, took her cup back to the counter.

“What was that about?” asked Cat, nodding in the direction of the door. “Who was that woman?”

“It was all about a misunderstanding,” said Isabel. “And it was also about me. It was about my tendency to get the wrong end of things. To make assumptions. To interfere. That’s what that was about.”

“Aren’t you being a bit hard on yourself ?” Cat said. She was used to Isabel’s self-critical assessments and her frequent moral debates with herself—and with anybody else within earshot.

But the self-abasement in her aunt’s voice was more profound than usual.

“That’s my trouble,” said Isabel. “I’m not hard enough on myself. I have to stop this ridiculous assumption that just because somebody speaks to me I am bound to take up a cause.

Well, I’ve had enough of that. I’m going to stop.”

“Will you?” asked Cat. “Do you really think you will?”

Isabel hesitated before answering, but only for a short while. Then she said, “No. No, I don’t. But I’ll try.”

Cat burst out laughing, and Eddie, who had caught the conversation, looked up and met Isabel’s eye.

“You’re very nice as you are,” he muttered. “Don’t change.”

But Isabel did not hear what he said.

C H A P T E R S I X T E E N

E

GRACE HAD TAKEN THE CALL from Tomasso, and when Isabel returned home she found the note on her desk. It was written on one of the cards on which Grace liked to scribble her messages—cards which Isabel used to log in manuscripts. She resented Grace’s use of these cards for this purpose—a scrap of paper would have sufficed—but she had decided not to tackle her housekeeper about it. Grace was sensitive, and even a modest suggestion could easily be interpreted as criticism.

A very interesting man telephoned, wrote Grace. Tom somebody. Foreign. He’ll call again at three. I never get calls like that.

But be careful.

Grace was still in the house, working upstairs, and when she heard Isabel come in she made her way downstairs and popped her head round the door of Isabel’s study.

“You saw that message?”

Isabel nodded. “Thank you. He’s called Tomasso. And he’s Italian.”

Grace smiled. “I liked the sound of his voice,” she said.

“Yes, it’s very . . .” Isabel thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose there’s only one word for it. Sexy.”

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“Good luck,” said Grace.

Isabel smiled. “Well,” she said, hesitantly. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Grace opened the door fully and came into the room. “Don’t be defeatist. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t find somebody. You’re a very attractive woman. You’re kind. Men like you.

Yes, they do. They love talking to you. I’ve seen it.”

“They may like talking to me,” said Isabel. “But that’s about it. They’re frightened of me, I suspect. Men don’t like women who think too much. They want to do the thinking.”

Grace thought about this for a moment. “I’m not sure if you’re right about that,” she said. “Some men may be like that, but by no means all. Look at Jamie. Yes, look at him. He worships the ground you walk upon. I can tell that from a mile away.” She paused, and then added, “Pity that he’s still just a boy.”

Isabel moved over to the window and looked out into the garden. She felt slightly embarrassed by the direction in which the conversation was going. She could discuss men in general, but she could not discuss Jamie. That was too raw, too dangerous. “And what about you, Grace? What about the men in your life?”

She had never before spoken to Grace like that, and she was not sure what her housekeeper’s reaction would be. She looked round and saw that Grace had not taken offence at the question. She decided to be more specific. “You told me the other day that you had met somebody at the spiritualist meetings.

Remember?”

Grace picked up a pencil from the desk and examined its tip nonchalantly. “Did I? Well, perhaps I did.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “You told me about him and then I think I F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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saw him when I went there with you. That man sitting behind us—that good-looking man—the one who had lost his wife.

That was him, wasn’t it?”

The pencil became more interesting to Grace. “Could be.”

“Ah!” said Isabel. “Well, I must say that I thought him rather nice. And he obviously liked you. I could tell.”

“He’s easy to talk to,” said Grace. “He’s one of those men who listens to what you have to say. I always like that. A gentleman.”

“Yes,” agreed Isabel. “A gentleman. Now that’s a useful word, isn’t it? And yet everybody’s too embarrassed to use it these days, for some reason. Is it considered snobbish, do you think? Is that it?”

Grace put the pencil back on the desk. “Maybe,” she said.

“I wouldn’t think that, though. You get all sorts of gentlemen. It doesn’t matter where they’re from or who they are. They’re just gentlemen. You can trust them.”

Isabel thought, And then you get men like John Liamor. And you know, or you should know, that he’s not a gentleman. She had known that, of course, and had ignored it, because one of the effects of those who are not gentlemen is that one’s judgement is overcome. You don’t care. But she did not want to think about him now because she realised that time was doing its healing, and he seemed to have become more and more distant. And she liked the feeling of forgetting, of the slow conversion into the state of his being just another person, somebody whom she could think about, if he came to mind, without feeling a pang of loss and of longing.

She looked at Grace. If this conversation went too far, then Grace would simply remember that she had something to do and would go off and do it, leaving the exchange in midair. This 1 7 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sometimes happened when she had argued herself into a corner over some point and could not retract; the ironing would suddenly call, or something would be remembered upstairs. But now she was showing no signs of ending their conversation, and so Isabel continued.

“Of course, you may not be the only one to like him,” Isabel said. She tried to make the observation a casual one, but there was an edge to her voice, which Grace noticed. She looked up sharply.

“Why do you say that?”

Isabel swallowed hard. How would one put this? “I thought that the medium showed an interest,” she said. “She certainly kept her eyes on him. Over tea afterwards . . .”

“She often looks at people,” said Grace defensively. “That’s the way they communicate. They have to establish a rapport with the people there so that the other side can get in touch.”

Isabel thought for a moment. Grace was showing loyalty to the medium, which she should have expected. “But—and please correct me if I’m wrong—wasn’t that message she gave about somebody’s wife being concerned that somebody else was trying to get to know him better—wasn’t that directed at your friend? Didn’t you see his reaction?”

Grace pursed her lips. “I wasn’t watching very closely,”

she said.

“Well, I was,” said Isabel. “And I could tell that he thought the message was for him. It was as if somebody had hit him over the head with a rolled-up newspaper.”

Grace sniffed. “I don’t know. Some of these messages are rather general. That could have been for anybody there. Most of the men who go to these meetings have lost their wives, you know. That man isn’t the only one.”

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Isabel stared at Grace. Her housekeeper had many merits, she thought. She was direct in her manner, she was utterly truthful, and she had no time for hypocrisy. But when she chose to deny the obvious, she could do so with a tenacity that was infinitely frustrating.

“Grace,” she said. “I didn’t want to spell it out, but you force me to do so. I thought the medium had eyes just for that man.

She was devouring him. Now then, imagine that you are a medium and you notice that the man you’re after is getting a bit too friendly with another woman. What do you do? Suddenly you discover that the wife is coming through from the other side and, lo and behold, she tells him that the opposition is bad for him. And since he believes it’s his wife talking, he takes the warning seriously. End of romance for . . . well, sorry to put it this way, but, end of possible romance for you.”

While Isabel was talking, Grace had fixed her with an unblinking stare. Now, picking up the pencil again, she twirled it gently between her fingers. Then she laughed.

“But what if the wife has got it right? What if I’m not good for him? What then?”

Isabel thought quickly. Her analysis, which she was sure was true, was based on the assumption that the medium was inventing the message. It was inconceivable to her that there was any communication with the dead wife, and so she had to think this. But if, like Grace, one thought that the message could be genuine, then quite another conclusion might be reached.

“If you believe that,” she said, “then I suppose you might keep away from each other.”

“Exactly,” said Grace.

Isabel was puzzled. Most women did not abandon a man to 1 7 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h another woman without at least some attempt at a fight. And yet Grace seemed to be prepared to hand victory to the medium.

“I’m surprised that you’re giving up so easily,” she said. “In my view, that woman is resorting to a cheap trick. And you’re letting her get away with it.”

“I may not agree,” said Grace. “So there we are.” She looked at her watch and turned away. The conversation had come to an end. “There’s work to be done,” she said. “What about you? Is the Review up to date?”

Isabel rose to her feet. “It never is,” she said. “It’s a Sisyphean labour for me. I push a rock up a hill and then it rolls down again.”

“Everybody’s job is like that,” said Grace. “I wash things and they become dirty and need washing again. You publish one set of articles and another sack of them comes in. Even the Queen’s job is like that. She opens one bridge and they build another.

She signs one law and they pass another.” She sighed, as if weighed down by the thought of the royal burden.

“Our lot is labour,” said Isabel.

Grace, who had picked up a piece of paper from the floor, nodded. “Consider the lilies of the field,” she said, “they neither . . .”

“Toil nor spin,” supplied Isabel.

“That’s right,” Grace went on, completing the quotation:

“And even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

“Solomon,” mused Isabel. “What do you think his glory was like? Gold trappings and all that sort of thing?”

Grace examined the piece of paper she had retrieved from the floor. It was a page detached from a manuscript—something about sorrow and loss. It would never be reunited with its fel-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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low pages, she thought, as she placed it on the desk. “I suppose so. Heavy robes with lots of gold. Very hot for that part of the world. Most uncomfortable. Have you seen the paintings of Mary, Queen of Scots? How hot and uncomfortable they must have been in those dresses. And they had no deodorants, you know.”

“But everybody was in the same boat,” said Isabel. “I think they didn’t notice.” She paused, remembering her trip to Russia in the dying days of Communism, when there was nothing to be seen in the shops but echoing emptiness. She had travelled in the Moscow underground at the height of the rush hour, and the shortage of soap and the nonexistence of deodorant had made itself evident. She had noticed, but did the Russians?

“There was a very old man who lived near my uncle in Kelso,” Grace said. “I remember him as a child, when I went down there to stay with my uncle and aunt. He used to sit outside his front door, staring out onto the fields. They said that he was past his ninety-eighth birthday and that he hadn’t washed since the hot-water system in his cottage broke down twenty years before. He claimed that this explained his longevity.”

“Nonsense,” said Isabel, but she immediately thought, Was it really nonsense? There were friendly bacteria, were there not?

Colonies of tiny beings who lived on us in perfect harmony with their hosts and were ready to deal with the real invaders, the unfriendly infections, when they arrived; and yet at every bath we depleted their ranks, washing away their cities, their dynas-ties, their cultures. So she retracted, and said, “Well, perhaps not.” But Grace had already left the room.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h TO M A S S O ’ S T E L E P H O N E CA L L , when it came later that afternoon, was an invitation to dinner. He apologised for giving her such short notice—he explained that he had tried to contact her earlier—but would she be free that evening? Isabel had a friend who would never accept, as a firm rule, an invitation to do anything that day, as this would suggest that her diary was empty. That was pride, which could deprive one of so much fun; Isabel had no such compunction, and accepted immediately.

He chose the restaurant, a fish restaurant in Leith, the city’s port. It was in a small stone building that had been a fisherman’s house in simpler days, with a view across a cobbled street to a shipping basin. It had the air of a French bistro, with its plain-board floor, its gingham tablecloths, and the day’s specials written in coloured chalk on a large blackboard. Tomasso looked around quickly and gave Isabel an apologetic look. “They recommended it at the hotel,” he whispered. “I hope that it is all right.” As he leant towards her to whisper, she caught a whiff of cologne, that expensive, spicy smell that she associated with the turn-down scratch-and-sniff pages of the glossy magazines.

Isabel assumed that he was used to something smarter; he looked so elegant, in his tailored jacket and his expensive shoes with their tasteful buckles. “It’s very good,” she said. “Everyone knows this place.”

Her comment seemed to reassure him, and he relaxed.

He looked around again. “It’s difficult when you’re away from home,” he said. “If we were in Bologna, or Milan even, I’d know where to take you. When you’re abroad, you’re so vulnerable.”

“It’s hard to see you as vulnerable,” she said, and immediately she regretted this, as he gave her a curious look.

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“But you don’t know me,” he said. “How can you tell?”

Isabel looked at him, noticing what she had not noticed earlier on—the silk tie, the collar of his shirt, which was hard shiny white, as if it had been starched; the perfectly groomed hair, dark auburn plastered back so scrupulously, not a strand out of place. He had that look about him, the look which Isabel described as classic dancing instructor, a look which normally she would have dismissed, or written off as the outward sign of an inward vanity, but which now, for some unfathomable reason, pleased her. And she realised that as they had entered the restaurant, she had felt a thrill of pride to be seen with this man; she wanted others to see her with him. And that, she realised, was what people felt when in the company of the beautiful, and why they sought that company; beauty, glamour, sexual appeal rub off on those around the blessed object.

They were shown to their table, beside the window. She sat down; she had not looked at the other diners, and now did. A woman two tables away who was looking at her discreetly, and at Tomasso, turned away briefly so as not to be seen staring, and now looked back. Isabel recognised her, but could not work out why. They smiled at one another.

Tomasso looked at the other table. “Your friends?”

“Friends I don’t really know,” said Isabel. “That is what this city is like. It’s not very big.”

“I like it,” said Tomasso. “I feel as if I’m in Siena, or somewhere like that. But more exciting—for me, at least. Scotland is very exciting.”

“It has its moments,” said Isabel. The waiter had arrived and handed her a menu. He was a young man, a student perhaps, with regular features and a wide grin. He smiled at her and then at Tomasso. Tomasso looked up at him, and for a moment Isabel 1 7 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h imagined that she saw something, a look, a moment of understanding, pass between them. Or had she? She watched Tomasso’s eyes. He had glanced at the open menu placed in his hands, and now he looked back at the waiter.

Tomasso asked her whether she could recommend anything, but Isabel did not hear him. She was studying the menu and thinking about what she had seen, if she had seen anything.

Tomasso repeated his question. “Is there anything you can recommend? I don’t know, you see, these Scottish dishes . . .”

Isabel looked up from her menu. “I can recommend honesty,” she said. “And kindness. Both of those. I can recommend both of those.”

The effect of this on the waiter was to make him start. He had his notebook in his hand, and he clutched it to his chest in his surprise. And Tomasso’s head gave a small jolt, as if a string had been pulled.

Then the waiter laughed, immediately putting a hand up to his mouth. “Not on the menu tonight,” he said. “Not really . . .”

He trailed off.

Isabel smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was feeling flippant. I don’t know why I said that.”

Tomasso seemed confused. He turned to the waiter and asked him about one of the options, and was told about it. Isabel studied her menu. She was not sure what had prompted her curious comment. Perhaps it was the incongruity of the situation—

that she was dining with the man who had been pursuing her niece, although he was her own age; who was so slick and elegant, and who had given the young male waiter what had struck her as an appreciative look. Yet none of that justified rudeness or a weak attempt to be funny.

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She looked up from the menu and made a suggestion as to what they might have. The waiter, still eyeing her in a bemused way, agreed with her choice, and Tomasso nodded his assent. A bottle of chilled white wine, which Tomasso had chosen, was produced and their glasses filled.

The earlier awkwardness soon passed. Tomasso spoke about his day in Edinburgh and about his plans to drive up to Glencoe.

“Will Cat be going with you?” she asked. She knew the answer, but asked nonetheless.

He looked into his glass, and she realised that there was an issue of pride; he was the rejected suitor—rejected gently, and with humour, no doubt, but rejected. “She will not,” he said. “She has the business to look after. She cannot leave that.” He sipped the wine. Then, his face brightening, as if an idea had just occurred, he said, “Perhaps you would care to accompany me? The Bugatti has two seats. It is not the most comfortable of cars, but it is very beautiful.”

Isabel tried not to let her uncertainty show. “Glencoe?”

“And beyond,” said Tomasso, describing a wide movement with a hand. “We could drive across that island—the large one—Skye? And then . . . and then there is so much more.

There is so much of Scotland.”

“But how long would we need to be away?” asked Isabel.

Tomasso shrugged. “A week? Ten days? If you could not manage that, we could make it less. Five days?”

She did not answer immediately. The last time that somebody had invited her to go away like this was when John Liamor had suggested Ireland, and they had caught the ferry to Cork.

And that was in another life, she thought, or almost, and now 1 8 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h here she was, in this restaurant in Edinburgh with this man whom she hardly knew, being asked to go away.

She picked up her wineglass. “We barely know one another,” she said.

“Which makes it more of an adventure,” he said quickly.

“But if you think . . .”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think that. It’s just that to drop everything and go off . . .”

He reached out and touched her wrist, briefly, and then withdrew his hand. “But that is what makes it so exciting.”

Isabel took a deep breath. “Let me think about it,” she said.

“I need to think.”

Her answer seemed to satisfy him. He sat back in his chair and smiled at her. “Please do,” he said. “I am in no hurry to leave Edinburgh. It is very—how should I put it?—very congenial.

Does that sound right to you?”

Isabel nodded. “It’s close enough.” She moved her fork and knife slightly so that they were parallel with each other; a small detail, perhaps, but that was what zero tolerance was all about.

One started with the cutlery.

Tomasso was staring at her, as if waiting for her to say something. Well, she decided, I can ask.

“You’re in no hurry to get back to Italy,” she said. “May I ask: What do you actually do? Do you have a job to get back to, or . . .”

The or hung ambiguously in the air, but he did not seem to mind. “We have a family company,” he said. “There are many people who work in it. They do not need me all the time.”

“And what does this company do?” She was prepared for evasion, but somehow, face-to-face with him, what he, or the company, did seemed less important; a handsome face/absolves F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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disgrace, the words came to her unbidden, and original, too, she thought.

“We make shoes,” said Tomasso. “Mostly shoes for ladies.”

“Where?” Isabel asked. She asked the question, and knew it was abrupt, even rude.

Tomasso did not appear to mind the examination. “We have two factories. One in the south,” he said. “And another in Milan. The designs all come from Milan.”

“Ah yes,” said Isabel. “Cat told me about the shoes. I remember now.”

Tomasso nodded. “She met many members of my family at the wedding. That is where I met her. At one of the parties.”

“And that is when you decided that you would come to see her in Scotland?”

His right hand moved to his left cuff, which he fingered.

She noticed the manicured nails. There were no men in Scotland with manicured nails.

“That is when I decided to come to Scotland,” he said. “I have one or two things to do here. Family things. But I also hoped to get to know Cat better. I did not think that she would be so busy.”

“Perhaps she considers you too old for her,” said Isabel, and she thought, family things. What did he mean by family things?

Mafia things?

He did not react immediately. He looked down at the plate to his side, and dabbed at an imaginary crumb with a forefinger.

Then: “In Italy, you know, it is not at all unusual for a man in his early forties—which is what I am—to marry a girl in her early twenties. That is normal, in fact.” He looked at her evenly, holding her gaze.

“That’s interesting,” said Isabel. “It’s not normal 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 Maybe because we consider that equality is important in relationships. The woman in those circumstances will never be the equal of the man.”

He drew back slightly at her comment, feigning surprise.

“Equality? Who wants equality?”

“I do, for one,” said Isabel.

“Do you really?” he asked. “Are you sure about that? Don’t you find equality a little bit . . . well, dull?”

Isabel thought for a moment. Yes, he was right. Equality was dull, and goodness was dull, too, if one reflected on it; and Nietz-sche, of course, would have agreed. Peace was dull; conflict and violence were exciting. And this man, sitting on the other side of the table from her, was far from dull.

“Yes,” she said. “It is a bit dull. But then I’d probably prefer dullness to unfairness. I’d rather live in a society that was fair to its citizens than one in which there was great injustice. I’d rather live in Sweden than . . .” She had to think. What had happened to all the truly dreadful countries? Where were they? The usual whipping boys, exhausted by criticism, had caved in. But there were still places, were there not, where there were gross disparities of wealth and power. Paraguay? She had no idea.

They had been saddled with a picture-book dictator, but had he not been deposed? Were there still vast latifundia there? And what about those Arab countries where sheikhs and princes viewed the public treasuries as their private purses? There was plenty of injustice that nobody talked about very much. There was slavery still; debt bondage; enforced prostitution; trafficking in children. It was all there, but the voices that spoke about it were so hard to hear amongst all the trivia and noise and the profound loss of moral seriousness.

“Than where?” he pressed. “Than Italy?”

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“Of course not. I would love to live in Italy.”

He held his hands apart, in a gesture of welcome. “Why not come? Why not move to the hills above Florence, like all those other British ladies?”

Perhaps he had intended the remark to be a compliment, or perhaps it had meant nothing very much. But he had said other British ladies, and that put her into the category of artistic spinsters and eccentrics who haunted places like Fiesole; not a glamorous set, but faded, chintzy, dreamy exponents of Botti-celli and Tuscan cookery; maiden aunts, actual or in the making. He had invited her to travel to the Highlands in his Bugatti, and she had almost accepted; but this, she thought, is how he sees me. I would be company; a guide; somebody to read the map and explain the massacre of Glencoe. And I, my head momentarily turned, had thought that I could possibly be of romantic or even sexual interest to this man.

The waiter arrived with the first course. He placed the plate in front of her, scallops on a bed of shredded red and green peppers. As she looked at her plate, she teetered on the edge of self-pity, and then pulled back. Why should I agonise? she asked herself. Why should I always weigh the rights and wrongs of things? What if I just acted? What if I became, for a short time, the huntress and showed him that I was not what he imagined?

What if I made a conquest?

She looked up. The waiter had a pepper mill in his hand and was offering her pepper. This always irritated her; that the pro-prietors of restaurants should not trust their pepper mills to the hands of their guests. But it was not the waiter’s fault, and she dismissed the thought.

She looked across the table. “I’d like to think about your offer of that trip,” she said. “Next week perhaps?”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She studied his reaction, watching for any sign. But he gave little away—little beyond the slightest twitch of a smile at the sides of his mouth and a brief change in the light in his eyes, a flicker, a change in reflection, brought about, no doubt, by a trick of light, a movement of the head.

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JAMIE DID NOT LIKE playing for the ballet. From where he sat in the orchestra pit, just beneath the overhang of the stage, he found the sound of the dancers’ feet disconcerting. This is what it would be like to live, he thought, on the first floor, with noisy neighbours on the second. But it was work, and well-paid work at that, and he thought it better than listening to his pupils. That afternoon, on the day after Isabel’s dinner with Tomasso, he had played for the Scottish Ballet in a matinée performance, and had agreed to meet Isabel in the Festival Theatre café after the show.

She had to talk to him, she explained. And he had begun to ask, “About . . . ,” and then had stopped, because he knew what it was about, without having to ask. “Tell me when we meet,” he said, and added, as an afterthought, “You haven’t done anything unwise, have you, Isabel?”

Isabel realised that the answer to that was yes, but did not say so. She had virtually agreed to go off to the Highlands with an almost complete stranger (not that she intended to tell Jamie about that—just yet); she had impersonated a medium; she had reduced Graeme, on first meeting, to a state of tight-lipped 1 8 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h enmity; all of which, she thought, was unwise. And while her sense of moral obligation lay behind two of these bad decisions, behind the other one lay nothing but a sudden urge to show bravado. And yet that very act, the reckless flirtation with Tomasso (a flirtation on her side, now, if not yet on his), was the one unwise thing of the three that she did not regret. Indeed, the mere thought of it was pleasurable: a shameless, erotic challenge, a delectable fantasy. My Italian lover, she would be able to say; and then, with regret: Yes, I used him, I confess I did. Of course, she would never be able to utter that to anybody, although she might think it in private, and find comfort in the thought. My Italian lover— how many women would love to be able to say that to themselves, when confronted with the hum-drum, the brute limitations of their lives: Yes, I know, I know—

but I have had an Italian lover.

In the café at the Festival Theatre, Isabel looked out through the glass wall to the Royal College of Surgeons on the other side of the road. A small cluster of men and women was emerging from the gate at the side of the college, examinees poring over a piece of paper. One of the men jabbed at the paper with a finger, making some remark to the others. There was a shaking of heads, and Isabel felt a pang of sympathy: What had the poor man suggested? Removing the wrong organ? These were doctors who came from their hospital posts all over the world to attempt the fellowship examinations, and only a small number passed. She had heard a surgeon friend comment on it: seven—

out of sixty hopefuls, sometimes—invited to join the Fellows in some inner sanctum, the rest politely dispersed. The doctor who had gestured to the paper looked down at the ground; a woman beside him put her hand on his shoulder to comfort him. There would be a melancholy homecoming.

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Jamie slipped into the chair beside her; she turned and he was there, smiling in the way she found so appealing. “Arvo Pärt,” he said.

“Very slow,” she said. “Silences. Repetitive pätterns.”

He laughed. “Exactly. But I enjoy it, you know. This ballet we’ve just done uses a piece he wrote called Psalom. Gorgeous ärchitecture.”

“So you’re feeling in a good mood?”

He scratched his head and looked out onto the street. “I think so,” he said. “Yes, in fact I am in a good mood. Are you going to spoil it for me? Has something happened?”

“Let’s go for a walk,” said Isabel. “I feel a bit cooped up. We could talk while we’re walking. Do you mind?”

Jamie left his bassoon with a young woman at the ticket desk and joined Isabel on the pavement outside the theatre.

They crossed the road and made their way down Nicolson Street to South Bridge. They passed Thin’s Bookshop, as Isabel still called it, and turned down Infirmary Street. The Old College of the university towered above and behind them, a great quadrangle of grey stone. Above the dome, a gleaming statue of a naked youth, torch in hand, caught the late afternoon sun, gold against the high background of cloud. Isabel tended to look up when she walked round Edinburgh, because that was where the forgotten delights were—the carved stone thistles, the Scottish gargoyles straddling roof gables, the all but obliterated signs of the nineteenth century: pens, inks, loans—a palimpsest of the life and commerce of the town.

Jamie was talking about the Arvo Pärt and about his next engagement, a concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Isabel listened. She had her own topics which she wanted to raise with him, but Jamie was still exhilarated by the perfor-1 8 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h mance and she was content to let him talk. At the end of Infirmary Street the road dipped down sharply to the Cowgate, a cobbled slide for incautious cars and pedestrians. They branched off behind the morgue, heading for the stone steps that descended beside a shabby tenement block. There was broken glass on the steps and the large abandoned buckle of a belt.

“Things happen in this city,” said Jamie, glancing at the buckle.

“They do,” said Isabel. “You turn a corner, take a few steps, and you’re in a different world.” She pointed behind her to the statue on the high dome of the university. “He’s carrying a lighted torch for a reason.”

Jamie glanced behind him and for a moment his expression clouded over. He looked at Isabel. Then he stared at the wall of the tenement beside them, a place of poverty and hardship still, and at the steps worn down by the feet of centuries.

“This is all very different from the Pärt,” he said. “Music always is. You can exist for a while in a world of music and then you walk out into the street and the street reminds you that this is what is real.” He stared at her for a moment, in a silence of friends. “What’s happened, Isabel?”

She took his arm gently. She did not touch Jamie very often, although she wanted to, but now she took his arm and they went down the remaining steps together. She explained to him about the meeting with Rose in the delicatessen, and Rose’s disclosure that her son had not been the donor. He listened attentively as they walked down to Holyrood Road.

Then, when she finished, they stood still. They were standing opposite the offices of the Scotsman, facing the large glass building with its backdrop of crags and hill.

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“I don’t know what you’re worrying about,” said Jamie.

“This character, Ian, has simply been hallucinating, or whatever you call it. It just so happens that the hallucination took a form which fitted that woman’s partner. That’s what we call coincidence, isn’t it?”

“And so what do I do?” asked Isabel.

Jamie leant forward and tapped Isabel’s wrist with a forefinger. “You do absolutely nothing. Nothing. You’ve done what you can for that man and you’ve come up against a dead end.

You don’t want to go chasing after the real donor . . .”

She stopped him. “The real donor?”

Jamie shrugged. “Well, he got the heart from somebody.

You jumped to conclusions too quickly. There must have been another sudden death involving a young man. You saw the one that happened to be in the Evening News. But not everybody who dies ends up in the Evening News or the Scotsman. Some deaths are unreported. Some people don’t put notices in the paper.”

She said nothing. He looked at her, waiting for her to speak, but she did not. She was staring at the Scotsman building, watching a man in a black overcoat make his way out of the revolving door and down the steps to a taxi that was waiting for him at the kerb.

“I could ask him,” she muttered.

“Who?”

Isabel pointed. “Him. Over there. I know him. Angus Spens. He’s a journalist on the Scotsman. He can find anything out. Anything. All we need from him is a name. That’s all.”

“But why would he do this for you?”

“It’s complicated,” said Isabel. “We used to share a bath 1 9 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h together.” She laughed. “When we were five. My mother and his mother were very close. We saw a lot of each other.”

Jamie frowned. “What’s the point? Do you really think it likely that this other donor, whoever he is, was done in by a person with, whatever it is, a high forehead? Really, Isabel! Really!”

“I have to see this thing through,” she said. Because you have to finish what you start, she thought, and I have started this. I have tossed a stone into a loch. But there was more to it than that. For Ian, the finding of an explanation for what was happening to him was a matter of life and death. He had told her that he felt his recovery depended on the resolution of these strange experiences, and she was sure that he meant it.

People sometimes knew when they were going to die. They might not be able to explain it, but they knew. And she remembered standing in a gallery once, the Phillips, looking at an early painting by Modigliani. The artist had painted a road that led off towards the horizon, green fields on either side, hills in the distance, but that stopped short, before it reached any destination. And that, she had been told by the person beside her, was because the artist knew that his life was going to be a short one. He knew.

She turned away from Jamie, watching the taxi which had picked up Angus Spens speed off up the road. From the mist of early years she could still summon the memory of sitting in a vast white tub with a little boy at the other end, splashing water in her face and laughing, and her mother standing beside her and reaching down for her; her mother, whose face she saw sometimes at night, in her dreams, as if she had never gone away, and who was still there, as we often think of the dead, in the background, like a cloud of love, against which weather we conduct our lives.

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I S A B E L A N D JA M I E walked back up Holyrood Road, mostly in silence; he was thinking, she suspected, of Pärt again, and she had Angus Spens to think of now, and of how she would approach him. Just before the Cowgate they said their goodbyes, and Jamie made his way up a narrow alley that led back to Infirmary Street. She watched him for a few moments; he turned round, waved, and then went on. Isabel continued along the Cowgate, a street which ran under South Bridge and George IV Bridge—a sunken level of the old part of the city.

On either side high stone buildings, darkened by ancient smoke, riddled with passages and closes, climbed up to the light above. It was a curious street, Isabel felt, the dark heart of the Old Town, a street in which the inhabitants, troglodytes all, did not seem to show their faces and doorways were barred; a street of echoes.

She reached the point at which the Cowgate opened out into the Grassmarket. Crossing the road, she began to make her way up Candlemaker Row. Following this route, she could pass Greyfriars Kirkyard, head across the Meadows and be home within half an hour. She looked up again; to her right was the wall of the kirkyard, a high grey-stone wall behind which lay the bones of religious heroes, the Covenanters who had signed their names in blood to protect Scottish religious freedom. They had died for their pains. That anybody should believe so strongly, thought Isabel, so strongly as to die for a vision of what was right; but people did, all the time, people who had a sufficiency of courage. And do I have such a measure of courage? she asked herself. Or any courage at all? She thought that she did not; people who 1 9 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h thought about courage, as she did, often were not courageous themselves.

Candlemaker Row was largely deserted, apart from a couple of boys from George Heriot’s School round the corner. The schoolboys, their white shirts hanging out, stood back against the wall to let Isabel pass, and then giggled. Isabel smiled, and looked back for a moment because one of the boys had had an impish face and it amused her, an echt small boy in an age in which children had suddenly and absurdly become young adults. And that is when she saw him, on the other side of the street, some distance behind her, but walking in the same direction as she was. She turned away immediately and walked on, her head lowered. She did not want to see Graeme again; she did not want to catch his eye and feel the force of his hostility.

She reached the top of Candlemaker Row and continued round the corner to Forrest Road. There were people about now, people and traffic. A bus lumbered past; a man with a scruffy black dog on a lead stood in front of a shop window; two teenaged girls in short skirts walked towards Isabel; a male student, his jeans slipping down, barely suspended, deliberately exposing his boxer shorts, walked with his arm around his girlfriend, while her hand sought out the sanctuary of his rear pocket in a casual intimacy that she did not bother to conceal.

Isabel only wanted to establish a distance between herself and Graeme. He would have to turn at the top of Candlemaker Row, and he could be heading for George IV Bridge. But he did not.

When she glanced back again, he was there a few yards behind her, not looking at her, but so close now that he would soon draw level with her and could not fail to see her.

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She increased her pace, glancing back quickly. He was nearer now, and she saw that he was looking at her. She turned her head away; she was on Sandy Bell’s corner, the signs—

whiskies, ales, and music nightly—immediately beside her.

She hesitated for a moment, and then turned in, pushing open the swing door and entering the wood-panelled howff with its long, polished-mahogany bar and its array of whisky bottles on shelves. To her relief, she saw that the room was quite full, even now, just after five o’clock; later it would be packed, exuberant with music, filled with the sound of fiddles, whistles, singing. She approached the bar, pleased to find herself beside a woman, rather than a man. Isabel did not frequent bars, but this, now, was where she wanted to be, with people, in safety. She was convinced that Graeme had been following her, even if this was an absurd thought; people did not follow others in daylight on the streets of Edinburgh, or at least not on these streets.

The woman beside her looked at the new arrival and nodded. Isabel smiled, noticing the lines around the woman’s mouth, the small lines that advertised her status as a smoker.

The other woman was, she thought, somewhere in her thirties, but was ageing quickly—from alcohol, cares, smoking.

The barman raised an eyebrow expectantly, and for a moment she was tongue-tied. All those years ago she had gone into pubs with John Liamor, who drank Guinness, and what had she had? She looked ahead of her at the rows of bottles, and remembered the whisky nosing she had attended when Charlie Maclean had used those peculiar terms of his. She had forgotten which whisky was which, but now she saw a name she recognised, which she thought he had spoken of, and 1 9 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h she pointed to it. The barman nodded and reached for the bottle.

The woman beside her touched her glass, which was almost empty. Isabel was pleased to respond.

“May I?” she asked, gesturing towards the barman.

The woman’s face lit up. “Thank you, hen.” Isabel liked the characteristically Scottish term of affection. Hen. It was warm and old-fashioned.

“I’ve had a day and a half,” said the woman. “I’ve been on since ten this morning. Nonstop.”

Isabel raised her glass to her new companion. “What do you do?”

“Taxi,” said the woman. “My man and me. Both of us.

Taxis.”

Isabel was about to say something about this, how difficult it must be with the traffic, but then she saw him further along the bar, taking a glass of beer from the barman. The woman beside her followed her gaze.

“Recognise somebody?”

Isabel felt hollow. Graeme must have come in immediately behind her, followed her. Or could it be a coincidence? Had he been heading for Sandy Bell’s at just the time that she happened to be walking up Candlemaker Row? She did not know what to think.

She lowered herself onto a bar stool beside the other woman. Now she could not see him any more, nor he her, she imagined.

The taxi driver glanced down the bar again. “You’re upset about something, hen,” she said, her voice lowered. “Are you all right?” Then she added, “Men. Always men. The cause of all our troubles. Men.”

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In spite of her shock, Isabel was able to smile. The woman’s remark cheered her with its assumption of solidarity. We are strong together. Women were not alone in the face of bullies. As long as they could call one another hen and stand together.

Isabel noticed that the woman had placed a small phone on the bar, next to her glass, and the sight of it gave her an idea.

She had her pocket diary in her bag, and in it were the telephone numbers she had been using recently, noted down in the pages at the end.

“Could I ask you a favour? I need to make a telephone call.”

The woman willingly slid the phone along the bar. Isabel picked it up and dialled. Her fingers fumbled, and she dialled again. He answered. He could come, if she insisted. Was it important? Yes, he would be there in however long it took to call a taxi and to make the short trip to Sandy Bell’s.

“Please hurry,” said Isabel, her voice barely more than a whisper.

A S I S A B E L WA I T E D, she exchanged a few words with the woman beside her.

“You’re frightened of somebody, aren’t you? That fellow down there?”

Isabel could not bring herself to say that she was frightened of anybody. Her world—her normal world—did not involve fear of others, but she knew that many people lived in fear. We forget.

“I think he followed me in.”

The woman grimaced. “Oh, that sort. Pathetic, isn’t it?

They’re just pathetic.” She sipped at her drink. “Do you want 1 9 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h me to have a wee word with him? I get those types in the taxi.

I know how to deal with them.”

Isabel declined the offer.

The other woman seemed taken aback. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I don’t want a confrontation.”

“Don’t let them get away with it.” The advice was given with feeling. “Just don’t.”

For a while they sat together in silence, Isabel grateful for the company but engrossed in her own thoughts. And then Ian arrived, unobtrusively; suddenly he was beside her, a hand on her shoulder. This was the signal for the other woman to push her empty glass away and get up from her bar stool. “Remember, hen,” she whispered. “Remember. Take nae nonsense.

Stand up for yoursel’.”

Ian sat down on the vacated stool. He was dressed less formally than he had been when Isabel had seen him on previous occasions. His sweater and moleskin trousers were in keeping with the clothes of the drinkers in the bar. He looked relaxed.

“This is a bit of a surprise,” he began, looking about the room. “I used to come here years ago, you know. Hamish Henderson often sat over there. I heard him sing ‘Farewell to Sicily.’

It made quite an impression on me.”

“I heard it too,” said Isabel. “Not here. At the School of Scottish Studies once. He sang while standing on a chair, as I recall.”

Ian smiled at the thought. “That great, shuffling figure.

The teeth all over the place . . . You know, we took them for granted then, didn’t we? We had all those people amongst us, those poets, those Scots makars—Norman MacCaig, Syd-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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ney Goodsir Smith, Hamish himself. And you could see them in the street. There they were.” He looked at her. “Do you remember ‘The lament for the makars,’ Isabel?”

Isabel remembered: warm afternoons during the summer term at school, sitting on the grass with Miss Crichton, who taught them English and who loved the early Scottish poets.

“I have that entire poem in my head,” Ian said. “It’s such a striking idea—just to list all the poets, all the poets who have gone before. And then Dunbar says that he’s probably next! The good Sir Hew of Eglintoun,/Ettrick, Heriot, and Wintoun,/He has tane out of this cuntrie:—/ Timor Mortis conturbat me.”

He caught the eye of the barman and pointed to a whisky.

“Taken out of the country, Isabel. Such clear good language. I am taken out of the country. I am taken from you. I was almost taken out of the country, Isabel, until that young man, whoever he was, and those surgeons came to my rescue.”

The barman passed him a small glass of whisky and he raised it, giving the Gaelic toast. “Slainte.”

Isabel raised her own glass in acknowledgement.

Ian looked at her enquiringly. “Why have you asked me here, Isabel? Not to discuss poetry.”

She lifted her glass and looked into the whisky, which she was not enjoying. It was too strong for her.

“That man I told you about,” she began. “Graeme. The man I found.”

His expression changed; he now became tense. “You’ve decided on something?”

Isabel lowered her voice. “He’s here. Right here. But I’ve found out something. He’s got nothing to do with the person who donated for you. Nothing!”

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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 did not look round immediately, but stared ahead, at the bottles of whisky on the shelf. Then, very slowly, he turned his head and looked towards the back of the bar.

“Where?” he muttered. “I can’t see anybody . . .” He stopped, and Isabel saw his bottom lip drop slightly. His right hand, resting on the bar, was suddenly clenched.

Graeme was sitting on a bench at the back. He had a newspaper unfolded on his lap. In front of him, on a small table, was a half-empty glass of beer.

“Is that him?” Isabel asked. “Is that the man you keep seeing?”

Ian’s eyes were fixed on the figure at the other end of the bar. Now he turned back to face Isabel. “I don’t know what to think,” he said. “I feel very strange.”

“But it’s him?” Isabel pressed.

Ian looked over his shoulder again. As he did so, Graeme turned his head, and Isabel saw his glance come in her direction. She stared back at him, and they looked at one another, across the room, for almost a minute. Then he turned back to his paper.

Ian suddenly reached for Isabel’s arm. He clutched at her, and she felt his grip through the material of her sleeve. “I’m not feeling well,” he said. “I’m going to have to go. I’m sorry . . . I’m feeling very odd.”

Isabel experienced a moment of sudden alarm. His face looked drawn, pale; he had slumped slightly on his stool, his right arm slipping off the bar. She imagined the heart within him, the alien organ, sensing the adrenalin from the shock that he had experienced on seeing the face of his imaginings. It was folly to have invited him here, and for what reason? That he should conF R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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front this man, who had nothing to do with him anyway, since his partner’s son had not been the donor?

She put her arm round him, half to support him, half to comfort him.

“Shall I call somebody? A doctor?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. It seemed to Isabel that he was gasping for air, and she looked about wildly. The barman, from behind the bar, leant forward in concern. “Sir? Sir?”

Ian looked up. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m all right.”

“Let me take you to a doctor,” said Isabel. “You don’t look all right. You really don’t.”

“It sometimes happens like this,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with the heart. It’s the drugs, I think. My system is at sixes and sevens with itself. I suddenly feel weak.”

Isabel said nothing. She still had her arm about him and now he stood up, gently pushing her aside.

“That looks like him,” he said. “It’s very odd, isn’t it? That’s the face I’ve been seeing. Now, there he is. Sitting over there.”

“I’m not sure that I should have asked you to come,” said Isabel. “You see, I thought that he had followed me in here.

It occurred to me that at least we should establish whether it was him.”

Ian shrugged. “It’s him. But I don’t want to speak to him.”

He made a helpless gesture. “And what would I say to him, anyway? You tell me that he’s got nothing to do with what happened. So where does that leave us?”

They left the bar together, not looking back at Graeme.

Isabel asked him whether he would mind walking with her round the corner to the taxi rank outside the high Gothic edi-2 0 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h fice of George Heriot’s School. He agreed, and they walked off slowly. He still seemed slightly breathless, and she walked at the pace he set.

“I’m worried about you,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done this.” And as she got into the taxi, she said, through the open window, “Ian, would you like me to do nothing more? To keep out of the whole thing?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that.”

Very well. But there was another thing that had puzzled her. “Your wife, Ian? What does she think of my involvement in this? I’m sorry, but I can’t help wondering what she thinks about your seeing me, rushing out to meet me in a bar, for example.”

He looked away. “I haven’t told her. I haven’t told her about anything.”

“Is that wise?”

“Probably not. But don’t we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?”

Isabel looked into his eyes for a moment. Yes. He was right.

She closed the window. He walked to the next taxi on the rank and opened the door, and then both taxis moved out into the traffic. Isabel sat back in her seat. Before the taxi turned, to make its way along Lauriston Place, she looked back to the end of Forrest Road, half expecting to see Graeme appear, coming round the corner. But she did not see him and she upbraided herself for her overactive imagination. He had no reason to follow her.

He was an entirely innocent man who was simply annoyed with her for upsetting his partner. She should keep out of his way—

as she had been trying to do. She could imagine how he felt about her. She imagined his saying to a friend: There’s a silly 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, a so-called medium, who has upset Rose. There are people like that, you know: they can’t let the dead lie down.

Isabel settled herself back in the taxi seat. The key question in her mind was this: When their eyes had met in Sandy Bell’s, when Graeme had turned his head and seen her, had he looked surprised?

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

E

GRACE BROUGHT the morning mail through to Isabel’s study. There were many more letters than usual, prompting a grimace from Grace as she laid the towering pile of envelopes and packages on the desk.

Isabel gasped. If she were not there, how quickly would the mail pile up, gradually filling room after room, until the house itself was full. “What would happen if I went away, Grace?

What if I went off to . . .” She did not continue. She was planning to go away, or almost planning to go away, with an Italian, no less, in a Bugatti. But she could hardly say that to Grace—

just yet.

“Twenty-five letters today,” said Grace. “I counted them.

Ten manuscripts—ten! Four parcels that look like books, one of them extremely heavy. And eleven letters, of which three are bills, in my opinion.”

Isabel thanked her. It had become something of a ritual in recent months for Grace to attend the opening of the mail and for Isabel to hand on to her those items that could be placed straight in the recycling pile. Some were placed in the pile unsullied; others were torn up by Grace according to a system 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 her own devising. She never tore up anything from the Conservatives, but the other parties were torn up or spared according to her view of their current performance.

Isabel opened a letter with a neatly typed envelope. “My friend, Julian,” she said. She read the brief letter, laughing aloud at its conclusion.

“I believe he’s serious,” she said, passing the letter to Grace.

“An offer of a paper on the ethics of the buffet bar.”

Grace read the letter and passed it back to Isabel. “Of course it’s theft,” she said. “Helping oneself to bread rolls like that. Surely he can see that.”

“Julian Baggini is a subtle man,” said Isabel. “And his question is a serious one. Is it ethical to take extra bread rolls from the hotel buffet? And use them for your picnic lunch?”

“Really,” Grace snorted. “Is that what your readers want to read about?”

Isabel thought for a moment. “We could do a special issue on the ethics of food,” she mused. “We could use Julian’s paper there.”

“The ethics of food?”

Isabel picked up her paper-knife and stroked the edge.

“Food is a more complex subject than one might think, you know. There is every reason why a philosopher should think about food.”

“One of them being hunger,” retorted Grace.

Isabel conceded the point. “Philosophers are no different from anybody else. Philosophers have their needs.” She looked at the letter again. “Buffet bars. Yes. I can just imagine the problems.”

“Theft,” repeated Grace. “You shouldn’t take what’s not yours. Is there anything more you can say about it?”

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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 put her hands behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. Grace was in some matters, though not in others, a reductionist, a consummate wielder of Occam’s razor; which was a good thing, in a way.

“But it’s not always clear what’s yours and what isn’t yours,”

Isabel countered. “You may think that you’re entitled to that extra bread roll, but what if you’re not? What if the hotel intends that you should take only one?”

“Then you’ve taken something that you think is yours, but which isn’t,” said Grace. “And that isn’t theft—at least it’s not theft in my book.”

Isabel contemplated this for a moment. Two people go to a party, she thought, both with similar-looking umbrellas. One person leaves the party early. He takes an umbrella which he thinks is his, but he discovers when he gets home that it is the wrong one. That, she imagined, was not theft, in the moral sense at least, and surely it would not be theft in the legal sense.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered a discussion with a lawyer about that, a sharp-nosed advocate who spoke in a deliberate, pedantic way but who had a mind like . . . well, Occam’s razor. He had said something about how the law allowed a defence of error, as long as one’s error was reasonable; which in itself seemed reasonable enough.

“The law uses tests of reasonableness,” he had said, and he had proceeded to give her examples which had stuck in her mind.

“Take causation,” he went on. “You’re responsible for those consequences of your acts which a reasonable person would foresee. You aren’t responsible for anything outside that. So let me tell you about a real case. A had assaulted B and B was lying F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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on the ground, bleeding from a head wound. Along came C, who had attended a first-aid course. He had been taught about tourniquets and so he applied a tourniquet.”

“To the neck?”

“Unfortunately, yes. And the question was whether A was responsible for B’s death—which of course was by asphyxiation rather than loss of blood. What do you do about an unreasonable rescuer?”

Isabel had managed to keep a straight face, but only just.

This was, after all, a tragedy. “And was he?” she asked.

The lawyer frowned. “Sorry,” he replied. “I can’t for the life of me remember the outcome. But here’s another one. A has a fight with B, who pushes him out of the window. A doesn’t fall very far as he’s wearing braces, or suspenders, as the Americans rather more accurately call them. These get caught on the balcony and he ends up suspended. A crowd gathers down below and a rescuer appears on the balcony. ‘Get him down,’ the crowd shouts. Whereupon the helpful rescuer cuts the elastic.”

“That’s very sad,” said Isabel. “Poor man.”

The lawyer had remembered the outcome of that case, and had told her. But now Isabel had forgotten what he said it was.

She looked at Grace.

“But do you think that the person who takes the extra roll thinks that he’s entitled to it?” she asked.

“He may,” said Grace. “If I leave something on a table and say Help yourself, then surely you’re entitled to do just that.”

“But what if I took everything?” objected Isabel. “What if I brought my suitcase down and filled it with food? Enough for a week?”

“That would be selfish,” said Grace.

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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 her agreement. “Very selfish,” she said. “And is selfishness wrong, or is it something which the virtuous person should merely avoid?” She thought for a moment. “Perhaps the solution is that the invitation to help yourself is subject to an implied limitation. What it means is Help yourself to what you need. ”

“For breakfast,” added Grace. “Help yourself to what you need for breakfast. ”

“Exactly,” said Isabel. “I’m not sure how far we can get with the ethics of the buffet bar, but there are some rather interesting problems there. Shall I write to Julian, or would you like to do that?”

Grace laughed. “You, I think. Nobody would listen to me.”

“They would listen to you,” Isabel said.

Grace shuffled through the letters. “I don’t think so. And why should they? I’m just the cleaning lady to them.”

“You’re not,” said Isabel stoutly. “You’re the housekeeper.

And there’s a distinction.”

“They wouldn’t think so,” said Grace.

“There have been some very talented, very famous housekeepers,” said Isabel.

Grace’s interest was aroused. “Oh yes? Such as?”

Isabel looked at the ceiling for inspiration. “Oh well,” she said. And then she said “Well” again. She had made the comment without thinking, and now, when she put her mind to it, she could not come up with any. Who were the mute, unsung hero-ines? There must have been many, but now she could think only of the woman who had put Carlyle’s manuscript in the fire. She was a maid, was she not, or was she a housekeeper? Was there a distinction? She thought about it briefly and then decided that she was getting nowhere with anything, and the pile of mail 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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effectively as high as it had been before she had started to think about buffet bars, and bread rolls, and housekeepers.

She looked at the next letter, but put it down again before opening it. Her mind had returned to the possible special issue on the ethics of food. There would have to be a paper on the moral issues raised by chocolate; the more she thought of it, the richer became the philosophical dimensions of chocolate. It brought akrasia, weakness of the will, into sharp focus. If we know that chocolate is bad for us (and in some respects chocolate is bad for us, in the sense that it makes us put on weight), then how is it that we end up eating too much of it? That suggests that our will is weak. But if we eat chocolate, then it must be that we think that it is in our best interests to do so; our will moves us to do what we know we will like. So our will is not weak—it is actually quite strong, and prompts us to do that which we really want to do (to eat chocolate). Chocolate was not simple.

S H E WO R K E D S O L I D LY that day until three in the afternoon, when she telephoned Angus Spens at the Scotsman offices.

Angus was not there to take her call, but he called back fifteen minutes later, when Isabel was in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea.

“I saw you the other day,” she said. “You were getting into a taxi outside your office. You looked terribly smart, Angus, in your black coat. Very smart.”

“I was off to interview another Stuart pretender,” he said.

“We get these people turning up from time to time, claiming to be descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie or his dad. They’re a pretty motley crew, as you can imagine.”

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

“Cranks?” asked Isabel.

“Some of them,” said Angus. “The problem, as you no doubt know, is that Prince Charlie had no legitimate offspring. And his brother, who was a cardinal, enjoyed a very happy bachelor existence. He died full of years, but not exactly surrounded by descendants. So that was the end of the direct Stuart line. You learnt that in school, didn’t you? I certainly did.”

“But not everybody wants to believe it?”

There was silence for a moment. Then Angus sighed. “One of the problems of being in the newspaper business is that you get contacted by an awful lot of people who think the world is otherwise than we are told it is. They really believe that. And these Stuart people are a little bit like that. Some of them are perfectly reasonable people who really believe that they have a claim—and back it up with books on the subject. But others are fantasists, although every so often one comes along who appears to have a rather better claim. This one was an Italian and had been bombarding the Lord Lyon for ages with his papers. They took the view that he was at least who he said he was, and that there were interesting lines to explore, whatever they meant by that.”

“And?”

“And he turned out to be a most agreeable person to interview,” said Angus. “Very modest. Very charming. And you know what else? He bore a striking resemblance to James the sixth. It could have been old Jamie Sext himself sitting there. It was the bone structure, not the colouring. Just something about the cheekbones and the eyes. I was astonished.”

“There’s a good few generations in between,” said Isabel.

“Yes, but family looks go down the ages. Anyway, there he was, brimming with Jacobite enthusiasm. I wondered whether F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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he imagined that the clans would rise again if the Lord Lyon pronounced in his favour.”

“Well it was all rather romantic,” said Isabel.

“And Jamie Sext was an interesting monarch. An intellec-tual. Probably bisexual, or, should one put it, he ruled both ways?”

“You’re very amusing, Angus,” said Isabel drily. Then she laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to have had dinner with him?”

Angus would not. “It would have been highly dangerous to have dinner with any Scottish king,” he said. “That is, until recently, if you can call the Hanoverians Scottish. No, I don’t think dinner would have been a good idea. Look at Darnley and what happened to Rizzio.”

Isabel was not prepared to let this go. Rizzio, the Italian secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, had been murdered in Edinburgh before the Queen’s very eyes by a group of armed men.

Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley, was said to have been one of the murderers, acting out of jealousy. But Isabel felt that there was inadequate proof of this.

“Where exactly is your evidence, Angus?” she challenged.

“You can’t go round defaming people like that. You do Darnley a great injustice.”

Angus laughed. “How can you speak like that? This all happened in—when was it?—fifteen sixty-something. Can you do an injustice to somebody who hasn’t been with us for over four hundred years? Hardly.”

Again Isabel felt that she had to protest. As it happened, she was interested in the philosophical issue of whether you can harm the dead. There was more than one view on that . . . but perhaps this was not the time.

“I think that we shall have to come back to Lord Darnley 2 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h some other time,” she said. “And in particular, I should like to discuss with you the precise circumstances of his own death, or murder, as it undoubtedly was. I have views on that, you know.”

Isabel heard a sigh from the other end of the line. “Well, well, Isabel! So you might be able to solve that little issue. Now that would be a very good story. Can the Scotsman have the exclusive?”

“That depends on your attitude,” she said. “But look, Angus, I didn’t telephone you to discuss Scottish history. I want to call in a favour.”

Angus sounded surprised. “I thought you owed me . . .

Remember . . .”

“Let’s not count too scrupulously,” Isabel said hurriedly.

“Just a small favour. A name, that’s all.”

She told him what she wanted, and he listened quietly. She thought it would be easy, she said, and that surely he had his contacts in the health service or the hospital. Did he not have favours of his own to call in?

“As it happens I do,” he said. “There’s a certain doctor who had very sympathetic coverage from us when he appeared before the General Medical Council on a complaint. I felt genuinely sorry for him and thought he was in the right. Some of the other papers went for him in a big way. He was very grateful to me.”

“Ask him,” said Isabel.

“All right, but I won’t press him if he’s at all unwilling.”

They agreed that he would call her back if he heard anything, or even if he did not hear anything. Then they rang off, and Isabel turned to her cup of tea. She liked to mix Earl Grey F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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with Darjeeling. Earl Grey by itself she found too scented; Darjeeling took the edge off that. Flowers and smoke, she thought, and wondered for a moment about what Mary, Queen of Scots drank. She made a mental note to ask her friend Rosalind Mar-shall about that; she knew everything about Scottish queens and wrote books about them, in her house in Morningside. Poor Mary—she had spent so much time locked up in castles, poor woman, working away at her elaborate French needlework and writing those rather poignant letters of hers. Drinking chocolate had reached Spain by then, but had probably not reached the Scottish court. And tea did not arrive until the beginning of the seventeenth century, she believed. So it must have been some sort of herbal infusion, then, although she thought they did not drink infusions for pleasure; there was French wine for that.

Smoke and flowers, flavours of exile, and of a Scotland whose echoes one might just detect, now and then, in the lilt of a voice, in an old Scots word, in a shadow across the face, in a trick of the light.

A N G U S D I D P H O N E , as he said he would, but much more quickly than Isabel had imagined. She had finished her second cup of tea and was about to take the cup to the sink when the telephone rang.

“Here’s your name,” he said. “Macleod. Is that what you were after?”

She stood quite still. In her left hand, the empty teacup tilted, allowing a few last drops to fall to the floor.

“Isabel?”

She had been thinking; over her second cup of tea she had 2 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h been thinking about something else he had said, and now she wanted another name from him. “Thank you. But before you go, Angus, that Italian you interviewed—what was he called?”

“One of those very long, aristocratic Italian names,” he said.

“But I simply addressed him as Tomasso.”

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

E

ISABEL LEFT THE HOUSE and walked briskly along Merchiston Crescent to Bruntsfield. It was now shortly before seven, a good three hours after she had taken the telephone call from Angus with its two pieces of surprising information. And yet, three hours later, she could think of nothing else and wanted to talk to somebody. She had debated with herself as to whether she should contact Jamie, and had eventually decided to do so even if she had some misgivings. If she was looking for advice from him, then she had already had his opinion, which he had volunteered the day before on their walk to Holyrood. He had made it clear that there was nothing further that she could, or should, do. But that was before she had received the news from Angus. Now everything was different. Rose had deliberately concealed from her the fact that her son had been the donor.

And that suggested, Isabel concluded, that she had something more significant to hide. The most likely explanation was that Rose knew about Graeme’s involvement in the death of her son and had decided to protect him. And if that were true, then Isabel felt that she should have no compunction in passing on 2 1 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the information she had, such as it was. There would be no danger in those circumstances of destroying the relationship between the two of them on a mere suspicion.

It was a relief to her to know this. She could do what she had to do, and then start minding her own business once again.

But taking the decision to do something was not quite so easy if one had to take it without discussing it with anybody. And the only person she could really discuss it with was Jamie. Nobody else knew about this, except for Ian, of course, and after the scare in Sandy Bell’s, when he seemed to be buckling under stress, she was unwilling to expose him to more anxiety.

So it would have to be Jamie, and fortunately he had been free for dinner.

She had been candid over the telephone. “It’s an invitation with a price tag,” she had explained. “I want to ask you something. I won’t talk too much about it. But I do want to ask your advice.”

“About . . .”

“Yes,” she had interjected. “About that.”

She had expected him to sigh, or even to groan, and she was taken aback by his upbeat reply. “That’s fine,” he said. “In fact, I wanted to talk to you about that too.”

She did not conceal her astonishment. “You did?”

“Yes. But we can talk about it over dinner. That’s my door-bell. Adolescent number three. He’s the one who tries to play the bassoon with chewing gum in his mouth. Would you believe it?”

Isabel suddenly thought of Tomasso and of the disclosure made by Angus Spens. “I would believe absolutely anything,”

she said. “Anything.”

She walked into town, making her way across the Meadows against the stream of students coming from the direction of 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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university. The students walked in twos and threes, engaged in animated conversation, and she thought for a moment of how she herself had done precisely the same thing, walking with her classmates, talking about the same issues, and with the same intensity, as these young people. They thought, of course, that the only people who were interesting, who really counted, were those who were twenty, or thereabouts. She had thought that too. And now? Did people of Isabel’s age, in their early forties, think that the world was composed of people in their early forties? She believed not. And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don’t know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a foreign country with somebody who has never been there. They are prepared to listen, but it’s not quite real for them. We are all interested to hear what Argentina is like, but it’s difficult to feel for it unless one has actually been there.

The problem with being me, thought Isabel, as she walked along George IV Bridge, is that I keep thinking about the problem of being me. Her thoughts went off in all sorts of directions, exploring, probing, even fantasising. She suspected that most other people did not think like this at all. In fact, she had often wondered what other people thought about as they walked through the streets of Edinburgh. Did they think about the sort of things that she thought about—about what one should do, about what one should allow oneself to think? She was sure that they did not. And when she had asked Cat what she thought about when she walked every morning from her flat to the delicatessen, she had simply replied, “Cheese.”

Isabel had been taken aback. “All the time? Does cheese give you enough to think about?”

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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 had thought for a moment before answering. “Well, not just cheese, I suppose. I think about things in the delicatessen.

Olives too. Salami sometimes.”

“In other words,” said Isabel, “you think about your work.”

Cat shrugged. “I suppose I do. But sometimes my mind just wanders. I think about my friends. I think about what I should wear. I even think about men sometimes.”

“Who doesn’t?” said Isabel.

Cat had raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”

“I am just like anybody else,” said Isabel. “Although sometimes, I suppose, I think about . . .”

Cat had laughed. “I suppose if one wrote down all one’s thoughts through the day it would make very odd reading.”

“It would,” said Isabel. “And one of the reasons why it would make such odd reading is that language would be inadequate to describe our thoughts. We don’t think in words all the time. We don’t engage in one long soliloquy. We don’t mentally say things like: ‘I must go into town today.’ We don’t use those actual words, but we may still make a decision to go into town.

Mental acts and mental states don’t require language.”

“So a person who never learnt a language could think in the same way as we do?” Cat sounded doubtful. How could one know one was going into town unless one had the word for going and the word for town?

“Yes,” said Isabel. “A person like that would have mental pictures. He would have feelings. He would have memories of what has happened to him and knowledge of what may happen in the future. The only difference is that he would find difficulty in communicating these, or recording them for that matter.”

And she thought of Brother Fox, who had no language, other than a howl or yelp, but who knew about danger and fear, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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and who presumably had very precise memories of the layout of the walled gardens which composed his territory. She had looked into the eyes of Brother Fox on a number of occasions when they had surprised one another, and she had seen recognition in those eyes, and an understanding that he should be cautious of her, but not terrified. So there were memories in that mind, and at least some mute processes of thought, unfathomable to us. What is it like to be Brother Fox? Only Brother Fox knew the answer to that, and he was not in a position to reveal it.

I S A B E L H A D R E S E RV E D a table near the front window of the Café St. Honoré. From where they sat they could look up the short, steep section of cobbled road that led to Thistle Street. It was a small restaurant and well suited for a conversational dinner, although the proximity of tables to one another could be a problem if what one had to say was private. Isabel had heard, without consciously trying, snippets of choice gossip here such as the terms of a cohabitation agreement between a fashionable doctor and his much younger girlfriend—she was to receive a half-interest in the house and there was to be an independent bank account. And all of this came from his lawyer, who was talking to his own girlfriend, who was urging him on for further details. Isabel had looked away, but could hardly stuff her fingers into her ears. And then she had turned round and stared in reproach at the lawyer, whom she recognised, but was greeted with a cheerful wave rather than a look of contrition.

Jamie examined the menu while Isabel discreetly looked at the other diners. Her friends, Peter and Susie Stevenson, out for dinner with another couple, nodded and smiled. At the nearest 2 1 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h table, sitting by himself, the heir to a famous Scottish house, weighed down by history and ghosts, turned the pages of a book he had brought with him. Isabel glanced at him and felt a pang of sympathy: each in his separate loneliness, she thought. And I, the lucky one, able to come to this place with this handsome young man, and it does not matter in the slightest if they look at me and think, There is a woman out for dinner with her younger boyfriend. But then the thought occurred to her: they might not think that at all, but think, instead, Cradle snatch.

That was a disturbing thought, and a melancholy one. She consciously put it out of her mind and looked across the menu at Jamie. He had been in a good mood when she had entered the restaurant and found him already at the table. He had risen to his feet, smiled, and leant across to plant a quick kiss on her cheek—which had excited her, and made her blush, even if it was only a social kiss.

Jamie smiled back at her. “I’ve had some good news,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to telling you.”

She laid down the menu. Asparagus and red snapper could wait. “A recording contract?” she teased. “Your own disc?”

“Almost as good,” he said. “Oh yes, almost as good as that.”

She felt a sudden sense of dread. He had found a new girlfriend, would get married, and that would be the end for her.

Yes, that was what had happened. This was a last supper. She glanced at the man at his single table, with his book; that would be her lot from now on, sitting at a single table with a copy of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained open in front of her among the salt cellars and butter dishes, and the olive oil, of course.

“I don’t think I told you,” he said, “that I was having an audition yesterday. In fact, I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell you. I F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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wouldn’t want to have to say to you that I didn’t get in. I suppose it’s a question of pride.”

Isabel’s anxiety was replaced by relief. Auditions were no threat. Unless . . .

“The London Symphony,” he said.

For a moment she said nothing. The London Symphony was in London.

“Well!” she exclaimed with a Herculean effort of fellow feeling. “That’s very good.” Was “very good” too faint praise? She decided that it was—if she were to conceal her sudden, overwhelming despair. “That’s wonderful!”

Jamie sat back in his seat. He was beaming with pleasure.

“It was the most intimidating experience of my life. I went down just for the day, and they heard me at noon. There were about ten other players hanging around. One of them showed me his new CD, complete with his picture on the back. I almost gave up there and then.”

“What an ordeal.” She could not manage an exclamation mark. She was too dispirited.

“It was. Until I started to play.” He threw up his hands.

“Something came upon me—I don’t know what it was. But I could hardly believe the sound of my own playing.”

Isabel looked down at the table, at the knives and forks.

I have to expect this, she said to herself; it was inevitable that I would lose him, quite inevitable. And when one lost a friend, what was the right thing to do? To mourn the loss, or to take pleasure in the memories of the friendship? Of course it was the latter—she was well aware of that—but it was difficult, in the Café St. Honoré, to behave correctly when one’s heart was a cold stone within one.

Jamie continued with his story. “They told us that they 2 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h would not reach a decision that day, but they called me anyway, just as I was getting on the train to come home. And they said that they had chosen me.”

“No surprise that,” said Isabel. “Of course you’ve always been a very fine player, Jamie. I’ve always known that.”

He seemed embarrassed by the praise, and waved it aside.

“Anyway, we can talk about that later on. What about you?”

“Working,” said Isabel. “At the job I’m meant to do, and . . .”

Jamie cast his eyes up in a gesture of mock impatience.

“And at what you’re not meant to be doing, too, no doubt.”

“I know,” said Isabel. “I know what you’re going to say.” And she thought of what it would be like when Jamie had gone and they could not have these discussions. Could she get involved in what she called her issues if she had nobody to sound them out with, nobody to advise her? For that is what the loss of Jamie would mean to her.

Jamie reached for the glass of water that the waiter had brought him. “But I’m not going to say it,” he said. “Instead I’m going to give you a piece of information which I hope will—”

Isabel reached out and touched him on the arm. “Before you do, let me tell you something. I know you feel that I should disengage from this issue. I know you think I’ve followed totally the wrong path. I know that. But I heard today from that journalist we saw. Remember him?”

“The one you shared a bath with?”

“The very one. We were extremely small then, let me remind you. And the bath, as I recall, was quite large. Anyway, he found out from some medical contact the name of the donor.

And it’s Macleod.”

She lowered her voice to impart this information, although nobody was in a position to hear, except possibly the man F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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immersed in his book. But he did not know who Isabel was, although she knew exactly who he was, and he would never have eavesdropped.

She had expected her announcement to have a marked effect on Jamie, but his reaction was mild. In fact, he smiled and nodded his agreement. “Just so,” he said.

Isabel leant forward. “Macleod,” she repeated. “Macleod.

And that means that that woman lied to me. And it also means that Graeme, her man, could be the man whom Ian sees—if he really sees anybody, but let’s just imagine for the moment that he does.”

Again Jamie received this with equanimity. “Yes,” he acknowledged. “Macleod.”

Isabel felt her irritation grow. “You don’t seem to be in the least bit surprised,” she muttered, picking up the menu to examine it again. “I won’t burden you with this. I suggest that we change the subject.”

Jamie made a calming gesture. “Sorry, but you see, I’m not surprised. And the reason is . . . Well, I know that it’s Macleod.

But it’s not the Macleod you think it is.”

Isabel stared at him in incomprehension. “You’re losing me,”

she said.

Jamie took another sip of his water. “The other day after you left me, I decided to drop into the library on George IV

Bridge,” he said. “Like you, I went through the Evening News for the week that you talked about. And I found what I’m afraid you missed, Isabel. Not that I’m trying to rub it in . . .”

“You found something else about the accident?”

Jamie shook his head. “No. It had nothing to do with that accident. It was an entirely unrelated death—of a young man.

Tucked away in the death notices, on exactly the same day.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Yes, thought Isabel. It had been an obvious mistake on her part. She should have checked to see whether there was any other young man who died that day in the Edinburgh area. But she had not, and yet . . . She reminded herself that Angus had confirmed that the name of the donor was Macleod. So she was right; even if there had been another young man who had died that day, Rose’s son had been the donor.

“But we know that the donor was called Macleod,” she said defensively. “That rather suggests that my initial assumption was correct.”

“So was the other young man,” said Jamie simply. “Two Macleods.”

She stared at him open-mouthed. “Both . . .”

“Remember those stories about Hebridean islands where everybody’s called Macleod?” Jamie said lightly. “Well, Edinburgh’s not quite like that, but there are lots of Macleods, you know. And it just so happens that two Macleods unfortunately died on that day. The other Macleod, Gavin, lived just outside town, in West Linton. The death notice gave the name of his mother, Jean, and a younger brother and sister. No father was mentioned. But I looked up J. Macleod in the phone book and there’s a J. Macleod in West Linton. So that’s your answer.”

He finished speaking and sat back in his seat again. Then he spread his hands, palms outward, in a gesture of finality, as if to say that the case was closed. He tilted his head quizzically. “Are you going to leave it at that? Aren’t you going to have to accept that coincidences happen? And that some things are just inexplicable, or just meaningless—such as visions of faces by people who have had heart surgery? Can’t you just accept that?”

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Isabel made an immediate decision. “No,” she said. “I might in due course, but not just yet. I’d like to know a little bit more.

How did your Macleod die?”

“The death notice said that he died peacefully, at the age of twenty-two,” Jamie said, “ ‘after a bravely borne illness’—those were the exact words. So no accident. Nothing like that.” He paused. “Which makes your man with the high forehead a bit superfluous, doesn’t it?”

Isabel realised that she had much to think about, but for the moment she would say nothing more about it to Jamie, who would simply advise her to keep out of matters that did not concern her. He was clearly pleased with his findings, which made Isabel look a bit hasty. Well, he could enjoy his moment of triumph; she did not begrudge him that, but she had a duty to Ian to see things through, and she would.

She dodged his question. If Graeme was the man with the high forehead, then it was difficult to see where he fitted in. But he could not be the man. Graeme’s resemblance to the man whom Ian saw was purely coincidental, one of those highly unlikely chances that simply materialised to remind us that chance still existed. And Graeme’s irritation with her was purely an irritation based on his belief that she was interfering in things that did not concern her. And who could blame him? No, Graeme was irrelevant now.

“Well, you’ve given me something to think about,” she said.

“Thank you. And now, perhaps we can catch the waiter’s eye and order. There are other things to talk about. The London Symphony, for instance.”

Jamie beamed with pleasure. “The London Symphony!” he said. “Good, isn’t it?”

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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 tried to smile. Perhaps I’ve managed a down-turned smile, she thought, one of those smiles where the lips go down at the side. A rueful smile; full of rue, of sorrow.

“Where will you live in London?” she enquired. “Not that it’ll mean much to me. My geography of London is pretty shaky.

North of the river? South of the river? And don’t some people actually live on the river? Londoners and New Yorkers and people like that are so resourceful. They live in all sorts of caves and corners. Look at the Queen; she lives at the back of a palace . . .”

Jamie cut her short. “Some people live in houseboats,” he said. “I know somebody who has one. Pretty damp way to live.

No, I’m not going to live in London.”

“You’ll commute?” asked Isabel. “What about concerts finishing late? Don’t the trains stop? And what happens if you try to talk to your fellow commuters? If the silence gets too much for you? Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It’s the second biggest cause of death amongst the English in general. Sheer boredom . . .”

“I’m not going, Isabel,” said Jamie. “Sorry, I should have told you right at the beginning. I’m not going to take the job.”

It took her a moment to react to what he had said. Her first feeling was one of joy, that she was not going to lose him after all. It was simple joy.

“I’m so glad,” she said. And then, correcting herself, she said quickly, “But why? Why go for the audition if you didn’t want the job?”

Jamie explained that he had wanted the job, and that he had spent half the rail journey back thinking about when he would move and where he would live and so on. But the other half, from York onwards, was spent making up his mind to decline the offer.

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“By the time I reached Edinburgh, my mind was made up,”

he said. “I decided to stay.”

There was a tone of finality in his voice. Isabel hesitated for a moment; the simplest thing to do would be to say that she thought this was a good idea and leave it at that. But she was curious as to why he should have changed his mind. And then it came to her. Cat. He would not leave Edinburgh as long as he entertained a hope that Cat might change her mind about him.

“It’s Cat,” she said quietly. “It is her, isn’t it?”

Jamie met her eyes, but then looked away in embarrassment. “Maybe. Maybe . . .” He trailed off. Then: “Yes,” he said.

“It is. When I faced up to it, as I did on the train, that was what I decided. I don’t want to leave her, Isabel. I just don’t.”

From the heights of the elation she had experienced when Jamie had announced that he would not go to London after all, Isabel now descended to the depths of doubt. Once again the problem lay in the fact that she was a philosopher and that she thought about duty and obligation. From the selfish point of view she should say nothing; but Isabel was not selfish. And so she felt compelled to say to Jamie that he should not turn down something that was important to him in the hope, the vain hope, she had to say, that Cat would come back to him.

“She won’t come back to you, Jamie,” she said softly. “You can’t spend your life hoping for something that is never going to happen.”

Every word of her advice went against the grain of what she herself wanted. She wanted him to stay; she wanted things to remain as they were; she wanted him for herself. But in spite of this, she knew that she had to say the opposite of what she wanted.

She could tell that her words were having their effect, as he 2 2 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h remained silent, staring at her, his eyes wide. His eyes had in them a light which seemed to dim now, to change its quality.

What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was? But it was more than that. It was a glimpse of what life might be if there were no disharmony, no loss, no death. She wanted to reach out, to touch his cheek and say, Jamie, my beautiful Jamie, but she could not, of course. She could neither say what she wanted to say, nor do what she wanted to do. Such is the lot of the philosopher, and most of the rest of us, too, if we are honest with ourselves.

When Jamie spoke, he spoke quietly. “Just keep out of it, Isabel,” he said, between clenched teeth. “Just mind your own business.”

She drew back, shocked by his intensity. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was only trying . . .”

“Please shut up,” said Jamie, his voice raised. “Just shut up.”

His words cut into her, hung in the air. She looked anxiously in the direction of the neighbouring table. There was no sign of anything having been heard, but he must have heard, the man with the book.

Then Jamie pushed his chair back, noisily, and stood up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t feel in the mood for dinner tonight.”

She could not believe it. “You’re going?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

She sat alone at the table, frozen in her embarrassment.

The waiter came to the table swiftly and discreetly pushed Jamie’s chair back against the table. His manner was sympathetic. And then, crossing quietly from the other side of the restaurant, Peter Stevenson was at her side, bending down to whisper to her.

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“Come over and join us,” he said. “We can’t let you have dinner by yourself.”

Isabel looked up at him in gratitude. “I think the evening’s rather ruined for me,” she said.

“Surely there was no need for your friend to walk out like that,” said Peter.

“It’s my fault,” said Isabel. “I said something that I shouldn’t.

I touched the very rawest of nerves. I shouldn’t have done it.”

Peter placed a hand on her shoulder. “We all say things,”

he said. “Phone him tomorrow and patch up. It’ll look different then.”

“I don’t know,” said Isabel. She decided that some explanation was necessary. At the beginning of the evening she had rather relished the thought that people might imagine that she was with a younger lover; now she was not so sure whether that was what she would want people to believe.

“He and I are only friends,” she said to Peter. “I wouldn’t want you to think that there was anything more to it than that.”

Peter smiled. “How disappointing! Susie and I have just been admiring your choice in men.” He looked at her mischievously.

“We were also hoping that this might mean you were spending less time fussing about ethical issues, and more time enjoying yourself.”

“I don’t seem to be terribly good at enjoying myself,” said Isabel. “But thanks for the advice.” She hesitated; yes, he was right—she should enjoy herself. And for that, well, there was Tomasso. She could think about him, and their planned trip away together; that moment of—what was it?—irresponsibility?

No, she would look upon it as a moment of perfectly rational decision.

Peter nodded in the direction of his table. “Come along,” he 2 2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h said. “Join us. That’s Hugh and Pippa Lockhart at our table.

They met playing together in the Really Terrible Orchestra with us. She’s less terrible at the trumpet than he is—in fact, she’s quite good. You’ll like them. Come on.”

She rose to her feet. The remains of the evening could be salvaged, a small scrap of dignity recovered. She had had misunderstandings with Jamie before, and she would apologise to him tomorrow. And then she reminded herself who she was.

She was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was not a love-struck girl abandoned by a petulant boyfriend. These were restorative thoughts, and her mood lifted. She had done her duty and given him the advice that she was morally obliged to give him, so she had nothing to reproach herself for there.

And, besides all this, she had the overwhelmingly good news that he would not be leaving Edinburgh. It was as if a weather warning had been lifted. There had been a mistake: winter was cancelled and we would move straight to spring.

So she crossed the restaurant to join Peter and Susie, oblivious to the furtive, pitying glances from those who had witnessed the sudden departure of Jamie. She held her head high; she had no need of pity. She might apologise to Jamie tomorrow, but she had no reason to apologise to these people. Edinburgh was a nosy town. People should mind their own business.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

E

SHE LIKED THE ROAD out to West Linton, and always had.

It snaked round the side of the Pentland Hills, past old farm-steads and fields of grazing sheep, past steep hillsides of heather and scars of scree, past Nine Mile Burn and Carlops; and all the while, to the south-east, the misty Lammermuirs, blue and distant, crouched against the horizon. It was a drive that was too short for her, for the thoughts that she wanted to think on such a road, and she would gladly, if ridiculously, have doubled back and turned round and done it all over again so that she could prolong the pleasure. But she had a mission, a meeting with Jean Macleod, whom she had phoned and asked to see. She had said, I need to talk to you about your son, the son you lost, and the woman at the other end of the line had caught her breath and been silent for a moment before she said that Isabel could come and see her.