Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

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

  She began to read. Twenty minutes later she was still sitting with the manuscript before her, mulling over what she had read. That is what she was doing when the telephone interrupted her. It was Jamie.

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

  “You wanted to see me.”

  “Yes, I do. I need to see you.”

  She waited for him to say something more, but he did not. So she continued: “It sounds important.”

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

  She looked at the shelves of books. So many of them were about duty, and obligation, and the sheer moral struggle of this life.

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

  “Glad?”

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

  “But she wasn’t there,” said Jamie.

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

  “Friend,” said Jamie.

  CHAPTER FIVE

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

  Isabel thought: We must not forget this date, girls, and it came back to her and promptly silenced the alarm. 1492. She felt relief, but then doubt, and confusion. Constantinople had fallen not in 1492, but in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed had defeated the defenders. Remember, girls, that the Turk had more than one hundred thousand men, said Miss Macfarlane, and there were only ten thousand of us. Isabel had looked at Miss Macfarlane and wondered, but only for a moment. Miss Macfarlane was Scottish and yet she claimed affinity with the defenders of Constantinople. Us? And who was the Turk?

  “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” she muttered, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

  “And something happened in a place called Constantinople,” said a voice behind her. “That’s what Cat said. That’s how we’re meant to remember the number.”

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

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

  “You fed in the wrong number?”

  “No, but Constantinople did not fall in 1492. It fell in 1453. The Turk had over one hundred thousand men and we had only . . .” She paused. Eddie was looking confused. Of course he might never have been taught any history, she thought. Would he know who Mary, Queen of Scots, was? Or James VI? She looked at him, at the quiet, rather frightened young man whose life, she realised, had been ruined by something traumatic and who had done nothing to deserve that.

  “You’re going to have to be patient with me,” she said to him. “I really don’t know what I’m doing. And setting the alarm off like that was not very clever of me.”

  He smiled at her, nervously, but still it was a smile. “It took me a long time to learn how to do this job,” he ventured. “I couldn’t remember the names of the cheeses for ages. Cheddar and Brie were all right—I knew those—but all those others, that took me ages.”

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

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

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

  The delicatessen had three or four tables at which people could sit, purchase a cup of coffee, and read out-of-date Continental newspapers. There was always a copy of Le Monde and Corriere della Sera, and sometimes Spiegel, which Isabel found interesting because of its habit of publishing articles about the Second World War and German guilt. It was important to remember, and perhaps some Germans felt that they could never forget, but would there be a point at which those awful images of the past could be put away? Not if we want to avoid a repetition, said some, and the Germans took this very seriously, while others perhaps preferred to forget. The Germans deserved great credit for their moral seriousness, which is why Isabel liked them so much. Anyone—any people—was capable of doing what they did in their historical moment of madness—and their goodness lay in the fact that they later faced up to what they had done. Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine-tooth comb? She was not aware of it, if they did, and nobody seemed to mention the genocide of the Armenians—an atrocity which was virtually within living memory—except the Armenians, of course.

  And the Belgians, she suddenly remembered, who had passed a resolution in their Senate only a few years previously noting what had happened in Armenia. Some had said that was all very well, but then what about what Leopold did in the Congo? And were there not islanders, somewhere in the Pacific, whose ancestors stood accused of eating—yes, eating the original inhabitants of the lands they occupied? Most unfortunate. And then there were the British who behaved extremely badly in so many parts of the world. There was the woeful story of the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginals and so many other instances of cruelty and theft under the bright protection of the Union Jack. When would British history books face up to the appalling British contribution to slavery, which involved the Arabs, too, and numerous Africans (who were not just on the receiving end)? We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History, it seemed, could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination, an infinite regress of cruelty and oppression, unless forgetfulness or forgiveness intervened.

  All of this was very interesting, but nothing to do with the running of a delicatessen. Isabel reminded herself of this and opened the safe with the code which Cat had noted down for her: 1915. The year that the Turks fell upon the Armenians, Isabel noted, though Cat could hardly have intend
ed that. She had never heard Cat mention the Armenians—not once. Nineteen fifteen were the last four digits of Cat’s telephone number, an altogether more prosaic choice.

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

  THE MORNING WAS BUSY, but everything went well. There was one rather difficult customer who brought in a bottle of wine—half consumed—and claimed that the wine was corked and should be replaced. Isabel knew that Cat’s policy was to replace or refund in such circumstances, and to do so without question, but when she sniffed at the neck of the offending bottle what she got was the odour of vinegar and not the characteristic mustiness of a corked wine. She poured a small amount of the wine into a glass and sipped at it gingerly, glared at by the customer, a young man in a rainbow-coloured woolly hat.

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

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

  “It was corked,” he said.

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

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

  Isabel stared at him. She was sure that he was lying, but there was no point in persisting. “I’ll give you another bottle,” she said, thinking: This is exactly how lies prevail. Liars get away with it.

  “Chianti, please,” said the young man.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Of course not,” said Isabel.

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

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

  BEING BUSY, she had little time to think about the impending arrival of Jamie, who had agreed over the telephone to meet her for lunch at the neighbouring coffee bar and potted plant shop. Eddie ate his lunch in the delicatessen and did not need time off, he said, and so she was able to slip out at one o’clock when Jamie arrived.

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

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

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

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

  Jamie looked down, seeming to study the tablecloth. Isabel looked at his cheekbones, and at the en brosse hair. When he looked up, she caught his gaze, and held it—eyes which were almost grey in that light; kind eyes, she thought, which was what made him so beautiful in her view.

  “You’ve met somebody,” she prompted.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

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

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

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

  No woman likes to hear that from a man, thought Isabel. Men may think about women in those terms, but it’s certainly not what most women want to hear. But she nodded briefly and Jamie continued: “The difficulty is that this person, this woman I’ve met, is not somebody I thought I would fall for. I hadn’t planned it. I really hadn’t.”

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

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

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Wham! That’s the way it happens, isn’t it? But why fight it? Just accept that it’s happened and make the most of it. Unless it’s impossible, that is. But that doesn’t happen much these days. Montague and Capulet difficulties. Social barriers and all the rest. Even being the same sex is not a problem today.”

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

  Isabel caught her breath.

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

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

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

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

  “I didn’t ask for it to happen,” Jamie went on, sounding quite miserable. “And now I don’t know what to do. I feel . . . what do I feel? I feel, well I feel as if I’m doing something wrong.”

  “Which you are,” said Isabel. Then she paused. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but . . . but don’t you think you’re doing something wrong if you’re participating in deception, which adultery usually involves? Not always, but often. There’s somebody whose trust is being abused. Promises are being broken.”

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

  “But they’re still together?”

  “In name.”

  “In house?”

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

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

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

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

  The misery had not left Jamie’s voice. “Yes, I do feel guilty. And yes, I suppose I did want you to tell me that it was all right.”

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

  Jamie shook his head. “No.”

  “So what can I say?”

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

  Isabel understood now that he was in love. When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope.