Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

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

  Isabel was not prepared to go that far. “No, I don’t think so. But obviously you would know who he is once you spoke to them. Your right—if one can call it a right—is to be able to express your very natural and entirely understandable feelings of gratitude. You can’t do that at the moment—or you can’t do it properly.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He was silent for a moment. He had not yet tackled his mackerel fillets, and now he tentatively cut off a slice. “You see,” he said, “I’ve had a most extraordinary thing happen to me, and I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about it. I need somebody who will understand the philosophical implications of all this. That’s why it occurred to me that I could talk to you.”

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

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

  “As do I,” said Isabel.

  He nodded. “Psychology and philosophy view the world in the same way, don’t they? So both you and I would take the view that unexplained phenomena are simply that and no more—things that we haven’t yet explained but for which there is either a current explanation in terms of our existing understanding of things, or for which an explanation may emerge in the future.”

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

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

  “London taxi drivers,” interjected Isabel.

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

  “At least they know how to get you there,” said Isabel. “Unlike some places. I had to take control of a taxi in Dallas once and do the map-reading and direct the driver. I was visiting my cousin there. Mimi McKnight. And when I eventually arrived at her house, cousin Mimi remarked: ‘Every society gets the taxi drivers it deserves.’ Do you think that’s true, Ian?” She answered her own question. “No. The United States is a good country. It deserves better taxi drivers.”

  “And better politicians?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

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

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

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

  “Yes. Bits of it might.”

  “Unlikely, surely.”

  He sat back in his chair. “Why? The immune system remembers things. My immune system remembers, doesn’t it? Worms that are fed other bits of worms have been shown to have absorbed the characteristics of the consumed worm. It’s known as cellular memory.”

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

  He laughed. Although he might not have, thought Isabel. And I should be more careful in what I say to him. He’s trusting me in this conversation and I must not be flippant.

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

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

  “I’ll get to the point,” Ian continued. “Cellular memory theory—if you can call it that—would find it perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory. So when I received the heart of another, I acquired some of that person’s memories.”

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

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

  “Would have?” asked Isabel.

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER TEN

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

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

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

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

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

  Isabel thought for a moment. Was this true? She doubted it. There were unsolved murders, to start with: Jack the Ripper was probably never caught, and Bible
John, the Bible-quoting murderer who had so terrified Glasgow, was probably still alive somewhere in the west of Scotland, a man now in early old age, leading a normal life. He appeared to have got away with it, as had various war criminals. Perhaps the bigger the crime the more one was likely to go unpunished. The dictators, the commissioners of genocide, the looters of the treasuries of nations—they often escaped, while the small fry, the non-commissioned officers, the small-scale fixers, were pursued and caught.

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

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

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

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

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

  Isabel said nothing. She was not sure about the other side, but was open-minded enough to accept that we could not say with certainty that some form of spiritual survival was impossible. It all depended, she thought, on the existence of a necessary connection between consciousness and physical matter. And since it was impossible to identify the location of consciousness, one could not rule out the persistence of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. There were some philosophers who thought of nothing but consciousness—“the ultimate knotty philosophical problem,” her old professor had said—but she was not one of them. So she simply said: “Yes, the other side . . . ,” and then, “But he never reached the other side, of course. His new heart saved him.”

  Grace looked at her expectantly. “And?”

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

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

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

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

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

  Grace began to smile. “But you don’t believe in manifestations,” she said. “You told me that. Remember? I had spoken to you about a manifestation that we saw at one of the meetings, and you said . . .”

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

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

  “A face.”

  “Just a face?”

  Isabel took a sip of her coffee. “Yes. Not much of a manifestation, that. But it is rather odd, isn’t it? To see the same face. And to see it at the same time as the pain comes on.”

  Grace looked down at the tablecloth. With an index finger she traced a pattern; Isabel watched, but realised that it was nothing special, just a doodle. Did Grace go in for spirit-writing? she wondered. Spirit-writing had its possibilities—if it existed. Had somebody not been in touch with Schubert and acted as amanuensis while Schubert had dictated a symphony? Isabel smiled as she wondered whether the composer had suggested a name for this symphony: The Other Side might be appropriate, perhaps. She glanced at Grace, who was still staring fixedly at the table, and she suppressed her smile.

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

  Isabel explained that it was not. The face, Ian had said, was of nobody he knew, but was memorable: a high-browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline.

  “But here,” Isabel continued, “here’s the really interesting bit. As I told you, this person to whom I was talking is a psychologist. He looked up what has been written about the experiences of people who have had heart transplants. And he found that there was quite a bit. Some books. A few articles.

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

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

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

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

  Grace thought for a moment. “I don’t like to think about that,” she said. “You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It’s rather like breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe.” She took a sip of coffee. “But let’s get back to these cases. He said that one caught his eye. Why?”

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

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

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

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Or that’s what appears to have happened. The people who wrote the article are properly sceptical. All they say is that if there is such a thing as cellular memory
, then this might be a case of it. Or . . .”

  “Or?”

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

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

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

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

  Isabel did not know what to think. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps it’s one of those situations where one simply has to say that one doesn’t know.”

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

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

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

  “Perhaps,” said Isabel.

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

  For a moment Isabel felt alarmed. She had no desire to become involved in séances, but to refuse would seem churlish and would be interpreted as a recanting on the open-mindedness that Grace had just obliged her to acknowledge. But would she be able to keep a straight face while the medium claimed to talk to the other side? Would there be knocking on tables and low moans from the spirit world? It was a source of complete astonishment to her that somebody as down-to-earth, as straightforward, as Grace could have this peculiar interest in spiritualism. It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had seen suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with our character. The most surprising people did the most remarkable things. Auden, she remembered, had written a line about a retired dentist who painted nothing but mountains. That had interested her because of the juxtaposition of dentistry and mountains. Why was it that anything which a dentist would do would seem almost poignant? My dentist collects toy trains, she might say—because it was true. But why was that any funnier than saying that a bank manager kept toy trains? Or was that funny too?