Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The village of West Linton clung to the side of a hill. The Edinburgh road followed a high contour, with the village itself hugging the hillside down to the low ground below. On either side of the Edinburgh road there were Victorian villas, houses with wide gardens and conservatories and names that one might 2 3 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h see in any small town in Scotland, names redolent of a douce Scotland of golf and romanticism. It was not Isabel’s world; she was urban, not small town, but she knew it to be the Scottish hinterland, ignored by the cities, condescended to by the urban-ites, but still there. It was a Scotland of quiet manners and reserved friendliness, a Scotland in which nothing much happened, where lives were lived unadventurously, and sometimes narrowly, to the grave. The lives of such people could be read in the local kirkyard, their loyalty and their persistence etched into granite: Thomas Anderson, Farmer of East Mains, Beloved Husband of fifty-two years of . . . and so on. These were people with a place, wed to the very ground in which they would eventually be placed. The urban dead were reduced to ashes, disposed of, leaving no markers, and then forgotten; memory here was longer and gave the illusion that we counted for more. It was a simple matter of identity, thought Isabel. If people do not know who we are, then naturally we are the less to them. Here, in this village, everybody would know who the other was, which made that crucial difference.

She branched off the main road and slowly wound her way down into the village. On either side of the narrow main street, small stone buildings rose—houses, shops, a pocket-sized hotel.

There was a bookshop run by somebody she knew, and she would call in there afterwards, but for now she had to find the Wester Dalgowan Cottage, to which Jean Macleod had given her careful directions.

It was just off the road that led towards Peebles and Moffat—a small house constructed from the grey stone of the valley, at the end of a short section of potholed, unpaved track. Behind it the open fields stretched away to the south; in front of it a small patch of untended garden, suffocated by thriving rhodo-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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dendrons, gave the house privacy from the road. An old Land Rover, painted in British racing green, was parked beside the house.

The front door opened as Isabel approached it and Jean Macleod stepped out to greet her visitor. They shook hands, awkwardly, and Isabel noticed that Jean’s skin was rough and dry. The hands of a farmer, she thought.

“You found your way,” said Jean. “People often drive right past us and end up on the Moffat road.”

“I know the village a bit,” said Isabel. “I occasionally come out to see Derek Watson at his bookshop. I like this place.”

“It’s changing,” said Jean. “But we’re happy enough. We used to be quite an important little town, you know. When they drove the cattle down to the Borders. Then we went to sleep for a century or so.”

Jean ushered her into the front room of the cottage, a small sitting room furnished simply but comfortably. There was a table at one side piled with papers and journals. Isabel noticed a copy of the Veterinary Journal and drew her conclusions. Jean noticed her glance. “Yes,” she said. “I’m a vet. I help out in a practice near Penicuik. It’s small animal work. I used to do a lot of horses, but nowadays . . .” She left the sentence unfinished.

She looked out of the window, out towards the fields on the other side of the road.

Isabel had learnt from her visit to the other Macleod. She would be direct now.

“I’m very sorry about your son,” she said. “I don’t know you and I didn’t know him. But I’m sorry.”

Jean nodded. “Thank you.” She looked at Isabel, waiting for her to continue. But then she said, “I take it that you’re one of the bipolar support group. Have you got a child affected by 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 The question made clear the nature of the illness to which the newspaper notice had referred.

“No,” said Isabel. “I haven’t. I know what that’s all about, but I haven’t.”

Jean looked puzzled. “Then, forgive my asking, but why have you come to see me?”

Isabel held her gaze. “I’ve come because chance brought me into contact with somebody who has had a heart transplant.”

Jean’s reaction to Isabel’s words made it clear that Jamie’s assumption had been correct. For a brief while she said nothing, but seemed to grasp for words. Then she moved over to the window and stood quite still, looking away from Isabel, gripping the windowsill with both hands. When she spoke her voice was low, and Isabel had to strain to hear what she said.

“We asked for privacy,” she said. “We very specifically did not want to meet whoever it was. We did not want to prolong the whole agony of it.”

Suddenly she spun round, her eyes showing her anger. “I said yes, they could use the heart. But that was it. I didn’t want my other son to know. I didn’t want my daughter to know. It seemed to me that it would just make it all the more difficult for them. Another thing to come to terms with—that somebody else had a bit of their brother. That a bit of their brother was still alive.”

Isabel was silent. It was not for her, she thought, to tell others how to deal with this most intimate of tragedies. One could debate the matter at great length in the bioethical literature, but those who wrote of honesty and disclosure and the nobility of gift might not have lost a brother.

Jean sat down again, staring at her hands. “So, what do you want of me?” she asked.

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Isabel waited a moment before she answered, but when Jean looked up again she spoke. Then she told her of her conversations with Ian and of Ian’s anguish. “I know it sounds fanciful,” she said. “You’re a scientist, after all. You know that tissue is tissue and that memory, consciousness, is something else altogether. I know this just doesn’t make any sense. But that man, that man whose life your son saved, is experiencing what he claims to be experiencing.”

Isabel was going to say a bit more, but Jean had raised a hand to stop her. “It’s his father,” she said flatly. “That description is of my husband. Or it sounds like him.”

It was a repetition, Isabel thought, of what had happened before. She found it hard to believe. Coincidence piled upon coincidence. Names. Faces. All coincidence.

Jean had risen to her feet and opened the drawer in the table behind her. “My husband will be my ex-husband, I suppose, in a few months. When the lawyers get a move on.” She paused, riffling through papers. Then she extracted a small coloured photograph of the sort used for passport applications and passed it to Isabel. “That’s him.”

Isabel took the photograph and looked at it. A pleasant-looking, open-faced man stared at the camera. There was a high forehead, and the eyes were slightly hooded. She looked for a scar, but could not see one; there was not enough resolution in the picture. She handed back the photograph and Jean tossed it into the drawer.

“I don’t know why I should keep that,” she said. “There’s a lot of his stuff in the house. I’ll get round to clearing things out one of these days, I suppose.”

She closed the drawer and turned to face Isabel again. “You don’t know what happened, do you? Has anybody told you?”

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“All I know is what I’ve told you,” said Isabel. “I know nothing about you, or your son. Nothing.”

Jean sighed. “My son had not seen his father for months—

almost a year, in fact. When Euan—that’s my husband—left us, both of my sons refused to have anything more to do with him.

They were angry. I thought they would come round, but they did not. And so when my Gavin died—and it was the depressive illness that killed him, of course, he was in a very deep depression when he took his own life—he had not seen or talked to his father for a long time. He died in a state of estrangement. And Euan, you know, did not come to the memorial service. He did not attend his own son’s service.” She spoke slowly, but in a con-trolled way, looking at Isabel as she talked. “I assume that he felt massively guilty, and I suppose I feel sorry for him. But there we are. It’s done. It’s over. He has to live with his feelings now.”

She looked helplessly at Isabel. “He can’t bring himself to approach me for help. So that’s it. He still lives in the village, you know. So we have to try to avoid seeing each other. He drives out the other way, although it’s longer for him to get to his practice—he’s a vet, too. He can’t face the children.”

Isabel felt that there was not much that she could say. She wondered, though, what Jean felt about Ian’s claims. She had shown no real reaction to them and Isabel assumed that she discounted them.

“I hope that you don’t mind my coming here with this story,”

she said. “I feel very awkward about it. But I felt I had to come.”

Jean shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. As for the story itself, well, people are always imagining these things, aren’t they? I’m afraid that I’m a complete rationalist on all this. I’ve got no time for mumbo-jumbo.” She smiled at Isabel; the no-nonsense veterinarian, the believer in science. “I’m afraid, Miss Dalhousie,”

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she went on, “that I have never believed in any form of personal immortality. The end of consciousness is the end of us. And as for souls, well, the thing that strikes me is that if we have them, then so must animals. And if we survive death, then why should they not do so? So heaven, or whatever you want to call it, will be an awfully crowded place, with all those cats and dogs and cattle and so on. Does it make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.”

There were things which Isabel might normally have said to this. We were not the same as other animals, she thought: their consciousness was very different from ours. But at the same time she did not believe, as Descartes had asserted, that dogs were machines. If the concept of a soul had any meaning, then there was some sort of canine soul there, and it was a loving one, was it not? And if there was any survival of consciousness, then she did not imagine that it would be attached to a bodily form; in which case if there were any place in which this survival was located, it could well be full of doggy souls as well as human souls. But on all of this she had an open mind. We strove for God—or many people did—and did it really matter what form we gave to that concept of God? In her mind it was a striving for the good. And what was wrong with striving for good in a way which made sense to the individual? Grace paid her visits to the spiritualist meetings; priests and bishops celebrated their rites at an altar; people bathed in the Ganges, travelled to Mecca. It was all the same urge, surely, and an urge that seemed an ineradicable part of our very humanity. We needed holy places, as Auden pointed out in his poem to water: Wishing, I thought, the least of men their/Figures of splendour, their holy places. As always, such a generous sentiment expressed in a few beautiful words.

She looked at Jean. She had survived the death of her son 2 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h without the comfort of religious belief. And to do that, and not to have surrendered to despair, she must be a strong woman, who believes in something, in either just getting by in this life or continuing in the face of emptiness and lack of hope. Isabel glanced at Jean’s hands, those hands rendered rough, no doubt, from the soap that she had to use constantly in her work; and she reminded herself that this woman brought relief from suffering every single working day and that she must do that for a reason other than the need to live. So there was purpose there, even if she did not acknowledge it, or talk about it.

There was something else that Isabel wanted to ask her, and she asked it as she rose to her feet to take her leave. Did Jean’s husband know that his son’s heart had been transplanted? No, said Jean. She had told him of the death by telephone and their conversation had been short. He did not know.

O N T H E WAY B AC K she stopped at the bookshop in the village.

Derek Watson greeted her warmly and led her into his kitchen behind the second-hand section. On the table a musical score was spread out, an arrangement in progress, with pencil mark-ings and notes. He put on the kettle and fetched a battered biscuit tin.

Isabel looked at her friend. “You must forgive me, Derek,”

she said. “I have come to see you, and yet I do not feel like talking. I have just been to see Jean Macleod.”

Derek stopped where he was, halfway between a cupboard and the table. He winced. “That poor woman. Her son used to come in here regularly,” he said. “He was interested in books about the Highlands. I used to look out for things for him, and he would pore over them out there in the shop. And then I used F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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to see him staring out of the window, across the street there, at his father’s house. Sitting there staring.”

Isabel said nothing. “Could you just talk to me, Derek, and let me sit here and listen? Talk to me about your composers, if you like.” He had written several biographies of composers.

“If you insist,” he said. “I know how you feel, by the way.

Sometimes I just like to listen.”

Isabel sat and listened. Derek was working on a defence of the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer.

“It’s shocking,” he said. “In the nineteenth century there was Meyerbeer, widely revered as one of the great figures of grand opera. Then suddenly—bang!—he fell from grace. And I’m very sorry to say that Wagner must take some of the blame for that, with his anti-Semitic views. Such an injustice. Meyerbeer was a compassionate man, a man of universalist outlook. A good man. And he was dropped. When did you last hear one of his operas? Well, there you are.”

Isabel sipped her tea. Should she be doing more to rescue the reputation of Giacomo Meyerbeer? No, her plate was full enough as it was. She would leave Meyerbeer to Derek.

“And then,” Derek continued, “I’m working on a symphonic poem. That’s it over there on the table. It’s all about Saint Mungo, for whom I have a great deal of time. His grandfather, as you know, was King Lot of Orkney, but they had that peculiar pimple-shaped hill down near Haddington. When Lot discovered that his daughter had been taken advantage of by one Prince Owain—in a pigsty, mark you—he had her, poor girl, thrown off the hill. She survived, only to be put in a boat and let loose in the Forth. Not very kind. We treat single mothers so much better these days, don’t you think?”

He refilled Isabel’s teacup. “She drifted over the Forth and 2 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h landed near Culross. There she was rescued by Saint Serf, no less, and she gave birth to Saint Mungo. So out of unkindness and a lack of charity can come something good at the end of the day.” He paused. “I propose to capture that in a symphonic poem. Or, rather, I shall try to.”

Isabel smiled. Listening to Derek had made her feel better.

There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.

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E

THE NOTE FROM JAMIE was short and to the point. I shall not be surprised, he wrote, if you do not wish to see me again. If I were you, I wouldn’t. So all I can say is this: I should not have walked out of the St. Honoré like that. It was childish and silly. I’m very sorry.

“Dear Jamie,” she wrote in reply. “If there is anybody with any apologising to do, it is me. I had intended to telephone you and tell you how sorry I am but I didn’t get round to it in the excitement of . . . Oh, there I go. You won’t approve of what I’ve done, but I have to tell you nonetheless. I went out to West Linton and spoke to the mother. It wasn’t easy. But now I know, and I think that I am slowly coming to a full and rational explanation of what has happened. I am very pleased about that, even if you don’t approve of what you think of as my meddling. (I am not a meddler, Jamie, I am an intromitter. Yes, that’s an old Scots law term which I rather like. It describes somebody who gets involved. A person who gets involved without good excuse is called a vitious intromitter. Isn’t that a wonderful term? I, though, am not a vitious intromitter. )

“But an apology is due from me and you are getting it. Your 2 4 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h feelings for Cat are your affair and I have no business passing comment on them. I shall not do that again. So please forgive me for telling you what to do when you hadn’t asked for my advice in the first place.

“There is one further thing. I am very pleased that you have decided not to go to London. London is all very well, in its place, which is four hundred miles or so south of Edinburgh.

Londoners are perfectly agreeable people—very cheerful, in spite of everything—but I’m sure that you are so much more appreciated in Edinburgh than you would be in London. I, for one, appreciate you, and I know that Grace does too, and then there are all those pupils of yours whose musicianship would take a dive were you to absent yourself. In short, we have all had a narrow escape.

“Does that all sound selfish? Yes, it does to me. It sounds to me as if I am giving you all sorts of reasons to stay in Edinburgh while really only thinking of myself and how much I would miss your company if you were to go. So you must discount my advice on that score and do exactly as you wish, should a future opportunity arise. And I must do the same. Although I have no desire to go anywhere, except for Western Australia, and the city of Mobile in Alabama, and Havana, and Buenos Aires, and . . .”

She finished the letter, addressed it, and placed it on the hall table. When she left to go home in the afternoon, Grace would pick up the mail and deposit it in the postbox at the top of the road. Jamie would get her apology tomorrow and she would arrange to see him the day afterwards. She could ask him to bring some music and they would go into the music room and she would play the piano while he sang and it became dark outside. The editor of the Review of Applied Ethics (at the piano) 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 her friend Jamie (tenor). How very Edinburgh. How very poignant.

She thought to herself—and smiled at the thought—if one followed the well-ordered life one would start each day with the writing of one’s letters of apology . . . She wondered for a moment who else might be expecting an apology from her. Perhaps she had been a bit harsh in her rejection of that article on vice from that vicious Australian professor; perhaps he was gentle and sensitive and was in favour of vice only in the most the-oretical of senses; perhaps he wept by whatever shore it was when he received her rejection—more likely he did not. All the Australian professors of philosophy she had met had been fairly robust. And she had not been rude to him—a bit brisk perhaps, but not rude.

She went through to the kitchen, thinking of form and friendship and how letters—and gifts—were the only vestiges of form which remained to us in the conduct of our friendships.

Other cultures had much more elaborate forms for the recognition and cultivation of friendship. In South America, she had read, two men becoming friends might undergo a form of bap-tism ceremony over a tree trunk, symbolically becoming god-children of the tree and therefore, in a sense, brothers to each other. That was strange, and we were just too busy to arrange ceremonies of that sort; meeting for coffee was easier. And in Germany, where form is preserved, there would be linguistic milestones in the development of friendship, with the change to the familiar du address. Of course one should not too quickly start to use the first names of friends in Germany; in some quarters a good few years might be required. Isabel smiled as she remembered being told by a professor from Freiburg of how, 2 4 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h after several years of knowing a colleague, they were still on formal terms. Then, one evening, when the colleague had invited him to his house to watch an important football match on tele-vision, in a moment of great excitement he had shouted out “Oh look, Reinhard, Germany has scored a goal!” and had immediately clasped a hand to his mouth, embarrassed by the solecism.

He had called his colleague by his first name, and they had known one another for only a few years! Fortunately, the visitor had taken a generous view of this lapse, and they had agreed to move to first-name terms there and then, drinking a toast to friendship, as is appropriate in such circumstances.

Isabel had been intrigued. “But what happens,” she asked,

“if two colleagues agree to address one another as du and then they fall out over something? Does one revert to the old formal usage and go back to sie?”

Her friend had pondered this for a while. “There has been such a situation,” he said. “I gather that it occurred in Bonn, amongst professors of theology. They had to go back to the formal means of address. It caused a great many ripples and is still talked about. In Bonn.”

She switched on the coffee percolator in the kitchen and looked out of the window while the machine heated up and entered upon its programme of gurgles. The next-door cat, arro-gant and self-assured, was on the high stone wall that divided her garden from its own—not that he recognised these human boundaries. The real boundaries, the feline lines of territory, were jealously guarded and supported by a whole different set of laws that humans knew nothing about, but which had every bit as much validity—down amongst the undergrowth of cat jurisdiction—as did the law of Scotland. The cat hesitated, turned round, and stared at Isabel through the window.

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“That cat knew I was looking at him,” said Isabel, as Grace came into the room. “He turned round and stared at me.”

“They’re telepathic,” said Grace, simply. “Everybody knows that.”

Isabel thought for a moment. “I had a discussion with somebody yesterday about heaven. She said that one of the reasons for not believing in heaven—or indeed in any afterlife—is that there would be so many animals’ souls. It would be a terribly crowded place. Administratively impossible.”

Grace smiled. “That’s because she’s still thinking in con-crete terms,” she said. And then, with the air of authority of one explaining New York to someone who has not been there:

“Those physical things don’t apply on the other side.”

“Oh?” said Isabel. “So cats and dogs cross over, if I may use your term. Do you . . . do you hear from them at the meetings?”

Grace stiffened. “You may not have a high opinion of what we do,” she said, “but I assure you, it’s serious business.”

Isabel was quick to apologise—her second apology of the morning, and it was not yet ten-thirty. Grace accepted. “I’m used to people being sceptical,” she said. “It’s normal.”

Grace went out to the hall to check for mail. “No postie yet,” she said when she came back, using the Scots familiar term for the postman. “But this has been pushed through the door.” She passed over a white, unstamped envelope on which Isabel’s name had been written.

Isabel laid the envelope to the side of the percolator while she poured her coffee. Her name had been written in an unfamiliar hand, Miss Isabel Dalhousie, and underneath the words a flourish of the pen like one of those on Renaissance manuscripts. And then she knew; it was an Italian hand.

She took her cup of coffee in one hand and the letter in the 2 4 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h other. Grace glanced at her and at the letter, clearly hoping that Isabel would open it in the kitchen and she would find out the identity of the sender. But this was private business, thought Isabel. This was to do with their trip, and she wanted to read it in her study. The envelope had that charged look about it, something which was difficult, if not impossible, to identify, but which hung about love letters and letters of sexual significance like perfume.

She stood by the window of her study while she opened it.

She noticed that her hands were shaking, just slightly, but shaking. And then she saw from the top of the notepaper, Pres-tonfield House, that she had been right in her assumption.

Dear Isabel Dalhousie,

I am so sorry that I have had to write, rather than to call on you personally. I have some business in Edinburgh today that will make it difficult for me to see you before I leave.

I had very much hoped that we would have been able to make that trip together. I had found many places that I wished to visit, and you would have been a good guide, I am sure. I even found on the map a place called Mellon Udrigle, up in the west. That must be a very fine place to have a name like that and it would have been very nice to have visited it.

Unfortunately I have to go back to Italy. I have ignored my business interests, but they are not ignoring me. I must return tomorrow. I am taking the car on the ferry from Rosyth.

I hope that we shall have the opportunity to meet again some time, perhaps when you are next in Italy. In 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 meantime I shall remember our dinner together most fondly and remember, too, the trip that we never made. Sometimes the trips not taken are better than those that one actually takes, do you not agree?

Cordially, Tomasso

She lowered the letter, still holding it, but then she dropped it and it fluttered to the carpet. She looked down. The letter had landed face-down and there was nothing to be seen—just paper. She bent down, picked it up, and reread it.

Then she turned away and went to her desk. There was work to be done, and she would do it. She would not mourn for those things that did not happen. She would not.

She read through several manuscripts. One was interesting, and she placed it on a pile that was due to go out for refereeing.

It was about memory, and forgetting, and about our duty to remember. Its starting point was that we have a duty to remember some names and some people. Those who have a moral claim on us may expect us to remember at least who they are.

How long would she remember this Italian? Not long, she decided. Until next week, perhaps. And then she thought: It is wrong of me to think that. One should not forget out of spite.

All he did was flirt with me, as Italian men will do almost out of courtesy. The fault, if any, is mine: I assumed that he saw me as anything other than that which I am. I am the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics; I am not a femme fatale, whatever that’s meant to be. I am a philosopher in her early forties. I have male friends, not boyfriends. That is who I am. But it would be nice, even if only occasionally, to be something else. Such as . . .

Brother Fox, who was looking at her from the garden, although she could not see him. He was looking at her through the win-2 4 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dow, wondering whether the head and shoulders he saw behind the desk were attached to anything else, to legs and arms, or were a different creature altogether, just a head-and-shoulders creature? That was the extent of Brother Fox’s philosophising; that and no more.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O

E

IAN HAD EXPRESSED DOUBTS, as she expected he would, but finally he agreed.

“It’s simply a matter of going to see him,” she said. “See him in the flesh.” She looked at him and saw that he was not convinced. She persisted. “It seems to me that there is an entirely rational explanation for what has happened to you. You have received the heart of a young man who died in rather sad circumstances. You have undergone all the psychological trauma that anybody in your position might expect. You’ve been brought up against your own mortality. You’ve . . . well, it may sound melodramatic, but you’ve looked at death. And you’ve har-boured a lot of feelings for the person who saved your life.”

He watched her gravely. “Yes,” he said. “All of that is right.

That’s how it has been. Yes.”

“These emotions of yours,” Isabel went on, “have taken their toll. They have to. They’ve been translated into physical symptoms. That’s old hat. It happens all the time. It’s nothing to do with any notion of cellular memory. It’s nothing to do with that at all.”

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“But the face? Why should the face be that of his father?

His father—not my father.”

“The father of the heart,” mused Isabel. “That would be a good title for a book or a poem, wouldn’t it? Or, perhaps, The Father of My Heart. ”

Ian pressed her. “But why?”

They were sitting at one of the tables in Cat’s delicatessen during this conversation. Isabel looked away, to the other side of the shop, where Eddie was handing a baguette to a customer.

He was sharing a joke with the customer and laughing. He’s come a long way, thought Isabel. She turned back to face Ian.

“There are three possibilities,” she said. “One is that there really is some sort of cellular memory, and frankly I just don’t know about that. I’ve tried to keep an open mind, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more difficult it becomes to pin much on it. I’ve looked at some of the literature on memory, and the general view is that there just isn’t any convincing evidence for it—what there is seems anecdotal at best. I’m not New Age enough to believe in things for which there’s no verifiable evidence.” She thought for a moment. Was this too extreme? Some qualification might be necessary. “At least when it comes to matters of how the human body works. And memory is a bodily matter, isn’t it? So where does that leave us?

“The next possibility is sheer coincidence. And that, I think, is a more likely possibility than one might at first think. Our lives are littered with coincidences of one sort or another.”

“And the third?” asked Ian.

“The third is an entirely rational one,” said Isabel. “Some time, somewhere, after you had your operation, you saw something which pointed to the fact that the donor, your benefactor, was a young man called Gavin Macleod. Then, perhaps at 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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same time, you saw a photograph of Gavin’s father. You may not even have been aware that your mind was reaching these conclusions.”

“Unlikely,” said Ian. “Very unlikely.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow. “But isn’t the whole thing completely unlikely? Isn’t it unlikely that you would have had these symptoms . . . these visions? Yet that is all very real to you, isn’t it?

And if something that unlikely can happen, then why shouldn’t there be further levels of unlikelihood?” She paused, assessing the effect of her remarks on him. He was looking down at his feet, almost in embarrassment. “What have you got to lose, Ian?”

For several minutes he said nothing, and then he had agreed, with the result that now they were making their way out to West Linton, with Isabel at the wheel of her old green Swedish car.

She rarely drove this car, which smelled of old, cracked leather and which, in spite of being largely neglected, never once in all its years had refused to start. I shall keep this car until I die, she had decided, a decision which had made her feel bound to the car in a curious way, as life partners are bound to each other.

Ian was silent, tense beside her. As they negotiated their way out of the Edinburgh traffic, he stared out of the window, balefully, thought Isabel, like a man on his way to punishment, a prisoner en route to a new, remoter jail. And even as they passed Carlops, and the evening sky to the west opened up with shafts of light, he did not respond beyond a murmur to Isabel’s remarks about the countryside. She left him to his mood and his silence, but just before they reached West Linton itself, he pointed to a house some distance off the road, a large stone house with windows facing a stretch of moor. The last rays of the sun had caught the roof of this house, picking it out in gold.

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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 stayed there,” he said casually. “I spent three weeks there when I was recuperating. It belongs to friends of ours. They invited us to come and stay.”

Isabel glanced at the house and then back at Ian.

“You stayed in that house?”

“Yes. Jack and Sheila Scott. They’re friends from university days. Do you know them?”

She steered the car over to a small patch of grass at the side of the road and drew to a halt.

Ian frowned. “Is there something wrong?”

Isabel turned off the engine. “I wish you’d told me, Ian,”

she said.

He looked puzzled. “About Jack and Sheila’s house? Why should I have told you about that?”

“Because it provides the answer,” she said. She felt angry with him, and there was an edge to her voice. “Did you go into the village itself ?”

“From time to time,” he said. “I used to go and browse through the bookshop. You know it?”

Isabel nodded impatiently. “Yes, I know it. But tell me, Ian, would you have seen people while you were there?”

“People? Of course I saw people.”

She hesitated for a moment. They were near, so near to the solution. But she did not know whether she dared to hope that it could be so neat and tidy.

“And spoke to people?”

He looked out of the window at the grey-stone dyke that followed the side of the road. “It’s difficult to find dry-stane dyk-ers,” he remarked. “Look at that one. The stones on the top have fallen off. But who can fix them these days? Who’s got that feeling for stone?”

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Isabel looked at the dyke. She did not want to talk about that now. “People,” she repeated. “Did you speak to people?”

“Of course I spoke to people,” he said. “I spoke to the man who runs the bookshop. He’s a composer, isn’t he? I spoke to him and sometimes I spoke to people who came into the shop.

He introduced me to some of the customers. It’s very villagey, you know.”

Isabel knew that she could not expect the answer she wanted to the next question, but she asked it nonetheless. “And did you meet a vet?” she asked. “A vet who lives in the village, quite close to the bookshop?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “I might have. I can’t remember it all that well. I was still a bit fuzzy round the edges then, you know. It was not all that long after I had left hospital.” He turned and looked at her, almost reproachfully, she thought.

“I’m doing my best, Isabel. You know, this isn’t very easy for me.”

She reached out and took his hand in hers. “I know you are, Ian. I’m sorry. It’s just that we’re very close now. So let’s not talk about it any further. Let’s just go and see him. He’s expecting us round about now.”

H E H A D J U S T R E T U R N E D from work and was still wearing his jacket, a green waxed-waterproof. One of the pockets in the front was bulging with what looked like a bottle of tablets.

Beneath the jacket she glimpsed a red tie which she recognised: the Dick Vet in Edinburgh, the university veterinary school.

He opened the door to them and gestured for them to come in.

“This place is a bit of a bachelor establishment,” he said. “I mean to tidy it up, but you know . . .”

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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 glanced about her. It was not unduly untidy, she thought, but it was spartan, as if nobody really lived there. She stole a glance at Euan Macleod: there were the high forehead and the eyes; yes, he was not unlike Graeme. But his was a kinder face, somehow, a gentler face.

“You said that you wanted to see me about Gavin,” he said, as he motioned for them to sit down. “I must confess, I was a bit surprised. You know that I am separated from my wife? You know that we’re divorcing?”

Isabel nodded. “I know that.”

Euan looked directly at Isabel as he spoke, but there was no note of challenge in his voice. “So that meant that I didn’t see the children very much. In fact, my wife made it more or less impossible for me. I decided not to make a fuss. Only the youngest is under eighteen. The other two could decide for themselves in due course.”

Isabel caught her breath. This was a different story from his wife’s, but of course one expected very different accounts of a marriage ending in an acrimonious divorce. Both parties could rewrite history, sometimes without even realising that that was what they were doing. Both could believe their own accounts.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your son,” she said.

He lowered his head in a gesture of acknowledgement.

“Thank you. He was a very nice boy. But that illness . . . well, what can one say? Such a waste.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “But there was something salvaged from the tragedy. And that’s what we came to tell you, Mr. Macleod.”

He started to speak—something she did not catch—but lapsed into silence.

“Consent was given by your wife to the use of your son’s heart,” she said. “He was the donor in a transplant. And my F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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friend here is the person who received it. This is why he is alive today.”

Euan’s shock was visible. He stared at Isabel, and then he turned to Ian. He shook his head. He put his hands over his eyes.

Isabel rose to her feet and approached him. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I can imagine what you’re feeling,” she whispered. “Please, I do understand. The reason why we came to see you is that Ian, my friend, needed to be able to say thank you. I hope you understand that.”

Euan took his hands away from his eyes. There were tears on his cheeks. “I didn’t see him,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face the funeral. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t go . . .”

Isabel bent down and placed her arms about him. “You mustn’t reproach yourself about that. I’m sure that you were a good father to him, and to the others.”

“I tried,” he said. “I really did. I tried with the marriage too.”

“I’m sure that you did.” She looked at Ian, who rose to his feet and joined her beside Euan.

“Now listen to me very carefully,” she said. “Please listen.

Your son is living on in the life of this man here. And this man, who owes your son so much, has come to you because he needs to express his gratitude. But there’s another thing—he can say to you that farewell that you and your son did not exchange.

Look. Look.” She reached out and took Ian’s hand and turned it over, to expose his wrist. “Put your hand there, Euan. Can you feel that pulse? Can you feel it? That is your son’s heart. Your son would forgive you, you know, Euan. Your son would forgive you anything that you felt needed forgiving. That’s true, isn’t it, Ian?”

Ian began to say something, but could not continue, and so he nodded his assent and clasped the hand above his, firmly, in 2 5 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a token of forgiveness and gratitude. Isabel left them together for a few moments. She crossed the room to the window and looked out on the village, at the lights and the darkening sky.

Rain had set in, not heavy rain, but a gentle shower, drifting, soft, falling on the narrow village street and her green Swedish car and the hills, dark shapes, beyond.

“I see that it has started to rain,” she said. “And we must get back to Edinburgh soon.”

Euan looked up. She saw that he was smiling, and she knew from this that she had been right; that something had happened in those moments, something which she had thought might happen, but which she had not allowed herself to hope for too much, for fear of disappointment. I am often wrong, thought Isabel, but sometimes right—like everybody else.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T H R E E

E

GRACE PUT THE MAIL on Isabel’s desk.

“Not very many letters this morning,” she said. “Four, in fact.”

“What matters is the quality,” said Isabel, shuffling through the envelopes. “New York, Melbourne, London, and Edinburgh.”

“Edinburgh is the fish bill,” said Grace. “Smell the envelope. They write the bills out in that funny little office they have at the back of the shop. Their hands smell of fish when they do it. One can always tell the fish bill.”

Isabel raised the plain brown envelope to her nose. “I see what you mean,” she said. “Of course, people used to send perfumed letters. I had an aunt who put a very peculiar perfume on her letters. I loved that as a child. I am not sure whether I’d be so keen on it now.”

“I think that we come back to these things,” said Grace. “I loved rice pudding as a girl. Then I couldn’t touch it. Now I must say that I rather look forward to rice pudding.”

“Didn’t Lin Yutang say something about that?” mused Isabel. “Didn’t he ask: What is patriotism but the love of the good things that one ate in childhood?”

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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 laughed. “Grub first, then ethics. That’s what I say.”

Isabel began to say, “Brecht . . . ,” but stopped herself in time. She picked up the envelope which bore the New York postmark. Slitting it open, she extracted a letter and unfolded it.

For a few minutes she was silent, absorbed in the letter. Grace watched her.

She was smiling. “This is a very important letter, Grace,” she said. “This is from Professor Edward Mendelson. He’s the literary executor of W. H. Auden. I wrote to him, and this is his reply.”

Grace was impressed. She had not read Auden, but had heard him quoted many times by her employer. “I’ll get round to reading him,” she had said, but they both doubted if she would.

Grace did not read poetry—Grace’s razor.

“I wrote to him with an idea,” said Isabel. “Auden wrote a poem in which he uses imagery which is very reminiscent of Burns. There are lines in ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ about loving somebody Till a’ the seas gang dry. You remember those, don’t you.”

“Of course,” said Grace. “I love that song. Kenneth McKel-lar sings it beautifully. He made me fall in love with him. But there must be so many people who fell in love with him. Just like they all fell in love with Plácido Domingo.”

“I don’t recall falling in love with Plácido Domingo,” said Isabel. “How careless of me!”

“But Auden? What’s he got to do with Burns?”

“He taught for a short time in Scotland,” said Isabel. “As a very young man. He taught in a boarding school over in Helens-burgh. And he must have taught the boys Burns. Every Scottish schoolchild learnt Burns in those days. And still should, for that matter. You learnt Burns, didn’t you? I did.”

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“I learnt ‘To a Mouse,’ ” said Grace. “And half of ‘Tam O’Shanter.’ ”

“And ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’?”

“Yes,” said Grace, and for a moment the two women looked at one another, and Isabel thought: This is one of the things that binds us together—in all the privilege of my life, in all that has been given to me through no effort of my own, I am bound to my fellow citizens in the common humanity that Burns spelled out for us. We are equal. Not one of us is more than the other.

We are equal—which was the way she wanted it; she would have no other compact. And that is why when, at the reopening of the Scottish Parliament after those hundreds of years of abeyance, a woman had stood up and sung “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” there had been few hearts in disagreement. It was the rock to which the country, the culture, was anchored; a consti-tution, a charter of rights, written in song.

“I wrote to Edward Mendelson,” Isabel went on, “because I thought I could detect Burns—the influence of Burns—in one of Auden’s lines. And now he’s written back to me.”

“And said?”

“And said that he believes it possible. He says that he has some correspondence in which Auden says something about Burns.”

Grace’s expression suggested that she was not impressed. “I must get on with my work,” she said. “I’ll leave you to your . . .”

“Work,” said Isabel, supplying the word that Grace might have uttered in quotation marks. She knew that Grace did not regard the hours she spent in her study as real work. And, of course, to those whose work was physical, sitting at a desk did not seem unduly strenuous.

Grace left her, and she continued with the rest of the corre-2 5 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h spondence and with a set of proofs that she had neglected over the last few days. She did not regret the time she had spent away from her desk, particularly the previous day’s trip to West Linton. As far as she was concerned, she had done her duty by Ian and had brought the whole matter to its resolution. On the journey back from West Linton Ian had been loquacious.

“You were right,” he said. “I needed to say thank you. That was probably all there was to it.”

“Good,” said Isabel, and she had mused on how strong the need to thank may be. “And do you think that will be the end of those . . . what shall we call them? Experiences?”

“I don’t know,” said Ian. “But I do feel different.”

“And we’ve laid to rest all that nonsense about cellular memory,” said Isabel. “Our faith in the rational can be reaf-firmed.”

“You’re sure that I met him, or had him pointed out to me, aren’t you?” Ian asked. He sounded doubtful.

“Isn’t that the most likely explanation?” replied Isabel. “It’s a small village. People would have known about the death. They would have talked. You probably heard it, even if indirectly, from your hosts—a chance remark over breakfast or whatever. But the mind takes such things in and files them away. So you knew—but didn’t know—that Euan was the man you wanted to thank. Doesn’t that sound credible to you?”

He looked out of the window at the dark fields flashing by.

“Maybe.”

“And there’s another thing,” said Isabel. “Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don’t they? Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong.

The same applies to our lives. It’s exactly the same.”

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Ian said nothing to this, but thought about it all the way back to Edinburgh, and continued to think about it for the remainder of that evening, in silence and in gratitude. He was not convinced by Isabel’s explanation. It could be true, but it did not seem true to him. But did that matter? Did it matter how one got to the place one wanted to be, provided that one got there in the end?

JA M I E WA S I N V I T E D for dinner that evening and accepted. He should bring something to sing, Isabel said, and she would accompany him. He could choose.

He arrived at seven o’clock, fresh from a rehearsal at the Queen’s Hall and full of complaint about the unreasonable behaviour of a particular conductor. She gave him a glass of wine and led him through to the music room. In the kitchen, a fish stew sat on the stove, and fresh French bread was on the table. There was a candle, unlit, and starched Dutch napkins in a Delft design.

She sat down at the piano and took the music which he handed to her. Schubert and Schumann. It was safe, rather gemütlich, and she felt that his heart was not in it.

“Sing something you believe in,” she said after they had reached the end of the third song.

Jamie smiled. “A good idea,” he said. “I’m fed up with all that.” He reached into his music bag and took out a couple of sheets of music, which he handed to Isabel.

“Jacobite!” exclaimed Isabel. “ ‘Derwentwater’s Farewell.’

What’s this all about?”

“It’s a lament,” said Jamie. “It’s been dredged up out of 2 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Hogg’s Jacobite Relics. It’s all about poor Lord Derwentwater, who was executed for joining the rebellion. It’s all about the things that he’ll miss. It’s very sad.”

“So I see,” said Isabel, glancing at the words. “And this is his speech here—printed at the end?”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “I find that particularly moving. He delivered it a few minutes before they put him to death. He was a loyal friend to James the Third. They had been boys together at the Palace of St. Germain.”

“A loyal friend,” mused Isabel, staring at the music. “That greatest of goods—friendship.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Jamie. He leant forward and pointed to a passage in the printed speech. “Look at what he says here. Near the end—minutes from death. He says, I am in perfect charity with all the world. ”

Isabel was silent. I am in perfect charity with all the world, she thought. I am in perfect charity with all the world. Resolution.

“And over here,” said Jamie. “Look. He says, I freely forgive such as ungenerously reported false things of me. Then he goes to his death.”

“They acted with such dignity,” said Isabel. “Not all of them perhaps, but so many. Look at Mary, Queen of Scots. What a different world.”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “It was. But we’re in this one. Let’s begin.”

He sang the lament and at the end of it Isabel rose from her piano seat and closed the cover of the keyboard. “Fish stew,” she said. “And another glass of this.”

At the table, the candle lit, they used the French bread to soak up the fish stew at the edge of their plates. Then Jamie, who was facing the window, suddenly became still. “Out there,”

he whispered. “Just outside the window.”

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Isabel turned in her seat. She did so slowly, because she had guessed what it was, who it was, and did not want a sudden movement to scare him off.

Brother Fox looked in. He saw two people. He saw them raise their glasses of wine to him, liquid that for him was suspended in the air, as if by a miracle.

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.

This novel is the second in The Sunday Philosophy Club series. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and was a law professor at the University of Botswana and at Edinburgh University. He lives in Scotland.

Document Outline

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three