Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

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

  “But we have to doubt,” said Isabel. “Thinking is doubting. It amounts to the same thing.”

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

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

  That morning, Isabel was not in the mood for an exchange of this nature, and so she confined herself to a question about Grace’s nephew, Bruce. This young man was a Scottish nationalist, who believed firmly in the independence of Scotland. Grace herself had at times been influenced by his fervour, and muttered darkly about London, but this had never lasted. She was by nature a conservative, and the Union was something too settled to do anything radical about.

  “Bruce is off to some political rally,” she answered. “They go up to Bannockburn every year and listen to speeches. They get all whipped up, but then they come home again and go off about their business like everybody else. It’s a hobby for him, I suppose. He used to collect stamps, and then he took up nationalism.”

  Isabel smiled. “Such a striking-looking boy, in his kilt and his bonnet. And Bruce is such a good name, isn’t it, for a patriot? Could one be a convincing Scottish nationalist if one were called, say, Julian?”

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

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

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

  Isabel steered the conversation away from the subject of Bruce.

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

  “Another girl?”

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

  Grace nodded. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “I’ve seen them too.”

  Isabel was silent for a moment; the pronounced beating of the heart the physical manifestation of the emotion. Then: “With a blond-haired girl? Tall?”

  “Yes.”

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

  “It was near the university. There’s a café there near the back of the museum. They put tables out in the good weather and people sit out and drink coffee. They were there, at a table. They didn’t see me as I walked past. But it was Jamie and a girl. This girl.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Isabel was staring out of the window. There was a clematis climbing up the wall that divided her garden from next door, and it was in full flower now, large blossoms of striated pink. Grace thought that she was concerned about Cat; she had not worked out that this was personal distress. And indeed there was every reason for Grace to think that, Isabel reflected, because otherwise she would have to conclude that this was a case of an aunt—yes, an aunt—falling for the boyfriend of the niece, which was an altogether unseemly thing to do, and not the sort of thing that happened in Grace’s Edinburgh. But aunts have ids, she thought, and then smiled at the thought. There would be no emptiness any more, because she would again will herself to be pleased.

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

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

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

  Isabel supplied the word. “Jealous?”

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

  Isabel laughed. “Yes, he is ours, or so we like to think. But he isn’t really, is he? I had a dove. Do you know that line? The poet has a dove, and the sweet dove dies. But it could equally well fly away.”

  “Your Mr. W. H. Auden?”

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

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

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

  CHAPTER FOUR

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

  The delicatessen was only ten minutes’ walk from Isabel’s house. She made her way along Merchiston Crescent, past the line of Victorian flats that snaked along the south side of the road. Work was being done on the long building’s stonework, and several masons were standing on a scaffolding platform, while below them, at the foot of the structure, a stone-cutting machine whined and threw up dust. Isabel looked up and one of the men waved. Immediately to the side of the scaffolding, a woman stood at a window, looking out. Isabel knew who this woman was: the wife of a scholarly man who wrote obscure books about pyramids and sacred geometry. This was o
ne of the reassuring things about Edinburgh; if a person wrote about pyramids and sacred geometry, then the neighbours would know about it. In other cities even such an original might be anonymous.

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

  “You look just like an old-fashioned grocer,” remarked Isabel. “Standing there, waiting to welcome your customers.”

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

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

  With these burdens on her mind, she went inside, where Eddie, wearing the same style of apron as Cat, was opening a large new hessian sack of wholewheat flour, leaving the unpicked neck open for customers to dig into with a scoop. He looked up at Isabel and smiled, which she thought was progress. She walked over to him and held out her hand to shake his; Eddie lifted up his hand, which was covered in flour, and grinned.

  Cat led the way into the small office which she kept at the back. It was a room which Isabel had always liked, with its shelves of samples and its well-thumbed Italian food producers’ catalogues. Her eye was caught by a large poster on the wall advertising Filippo Berio olive oil: a man riding an old-fashioned bicycle down one of those dusty white roads which meander across the Tuscan countryside. Underneath the poster, Cat had pinned a leaflet from a Parmesan cheese factory which showed great rounds of cheese, hundreds of them, stacked up in a warehouse. She had been there, she thought, to that very factory, some years ago when she had been visiting a friend in Reggio Emilia, and they had gone to buy cheese direct from the factory. There had been a mynah bird in a cage in the front office, where they cut and wrapped the cheese for visitors, and the bird had glared at the visitors before screeching, scatologically, Bagno, bagno! Later she had heard that the bird had been relegated to a cage outside after a visiting Brussels bureaucrat had complained that the hygiene regulations of the European Union, that vast pettifoggery, were being flouted by the juxtaposition of bird and cheese.

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

  Cat laughed. “Of course. I’ve got a magnificent cheese which we’re working through at the moment. It’s just the right age and it’s delicious.” She stepped over to the door and called out to Eddie, asking him to bring in a small piece of the cheese. Then she took down a bottle from a shelf, uncorked it, and poured a small quantity of Madeira into a glass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She went into the kitchen. Grace left notes for her on the kitchen table—notes about household supplies and telephone messages. There was a large brown envelope waiting for her, and a piece of paper with a few lines in Grace’s handwriting. Isabel picked up the envelope first. It had not arrived with the normal morning delivery because it had been misdelivered to a neighbour, who had dropped it off. Isabel lived at number 6 while the neighbour lived at number 16, and a harassed postal official could easily make a mistake; but it was never bills that were misdelivered, Isabel reflected—bills always found their target. The envelope was simply addressed to the editor, and by its weight it was a manuscript. She always looked at the stamp and postmark first, rather than at the name and address of the sender: an American stamp, an aviator looking up into the clouds with that open-browed expression that befits aviators, and a Seattle postmark. She set the envelope aside and looked at the note which Grace had left. There had been a telephone call from her dentist, about a change in the timing for her check-up, and a call from the author of a paper which the Review had accepted for publication: Isabel knew that this author was troublesome and that there would be some complaint. Then, at the bottom of the list, Grace had written: And Jamie called too. He wants to talk to you, he says. Soon. This was followed by an exclamation mark—or was it? Grace liked to comment on the messages she took for Isabel, and an exclamation mark would have been an eloquent remark. But was this an exclamation mark or a slip of the pencil?

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

  She moved towards the telephone, but stopped. The hopeless admirer would be eager to call the object of her affections. She was not that. She was the independent woman who happened to have a friendship with a young man. She would not behave like some overly eager spinster, desperate for any scrap of contact with the man on whom her affections had settled. She would not telephone him. If he wanted to speak to her, then he would be the one to do the calling. She immediately felt ashamed; it was a thought worthy of a moody, plotting teenager, not of a woman of her age and her experience of life. She closed her eyes for a moment: this was a matter of will, of voluntas. She was not enamoured of Jamie; she was pleased that he had found a girlfriend. She was in control.

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

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

  She replaced the receiver in its cradle. Messages from people who were not there were unsettling, rather like letters from the dead. She had received such a letter once from a contributor to the Review whose article had been turned down for publication. I cannot understand why you are unwilling to publish this, he had written. And then, a few days later, she had heard that he was dead, and she had reflected on how her act had made his last few days unhappy; not that she could have reached any other decision, but the imminence of death might make one ponder one’s actions more carefully. If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who had only a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.