Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

  On Henderson Row, groups of boys were coming out of the Edinburgh Academy, clad in their grey tweed blazers, engaged in the earnest conversation which boys seem to have in groups. In the distance, somewhere within the school buildings, the Academy Pipe Band was practising and she stopped for a moment to listen to the drifting sound of the bagpipes. “Dark Island,” she thought; like so many Scottish tunes a haunting melody, redolent of loss and separation. Scotland had produced such fine laments, such fine accounts of sorrow and longing, whereas Ireland had been so much jauntier . . .

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

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

  “Isabel!”

  He was surprised to see her but not discouraging.

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

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

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

  Isabel saw a boy in an Academy jacket sitting in a chair near the piano, holding a bassoon. The boy was craning his neck to see who had arrived. Isabel gave a wave and the boy, embarrassed, nodded his head. She went through to the kitchen and sat down at Jamie’s pine table. There was a copy of Woodwind magazine on the tabletop, and she paged her way idly through it. There was an article on contrabass instruments and the illustrations caught her eye. A man stood beside a contrabass saxophone, one hand supporting it, the other pointing to it in a triumphant gesture. It was as if he had captured a rare specimen, which the instrument appeared to be, according to the article. It had been made by a factory in Italy which was still prepared to make such large instruments, in return for—she was shocked by the price. But what a beautiful piece of construction with all its gleaming keys and rods and great leather hole pads, like inverted saucers.

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

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

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

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

  The boy smiled. “How do you lift it?”

  “They come with stands,” said Jamie. “I know somebody who has an ordinary bass saxophone, which is slightly smaller. He has a stand for it. A stand with wheels.” He paused. “This is Isabel Dalhousie, John. Isabel is a friend of mine. She’s quite a good pianist, you know, although she’s too modest to say much about that.”

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

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

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

  “He seems nice enough,” said Isabel.

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

  “Ambitious parents?” asked Isabel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You didn’t set out to do that,” said Jamie. “It’s not as if you’re some charlatan exploiting bereaved people. I wouldn’t think any more about that.”

  Isabel looked up. “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Jamie, rising to his feet to make the tea. “Really. Your trouble, Isabel, is that you agonise too much. You worry about everything. You need to be a bit more robust. Lay off the guilt for a while.”

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

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

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


  “You’d be surprised,” said Jamie. He hesitated for a moment and then he said, “I had an affair with a married woman. Remember that? You yourself took a dim view of it.”

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

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

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

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

  “Yes,” she said. “What do I do now? If Ian’s theory is correct, then the hit-and-run driver is the mother’s partner. And I suppose it’s a theory that isn’t all that improbable. Let’s imagine that he had been driving back from a party, or from the pub, and he’s had too much to drink. He’s almost home when Rory steps out from behind a parked car and he knocks him over. He’s sober enough to realise that if the police are called—and they would of course turn up if an ambulance were summoned—he will be tested and found to be under the influence. Every driver these days knows that that means prison if you kill somebody in such a state—and a long sentence too. So he panics and drives round the corner or wherever it is that he parks. He checks the paintwork—no obvious marks. So then he goes home and pretends it never happened.”

  Jamie listened carefully. “That sounds perfectly credible,” he said once Isabel had finished. “So what now?”

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SCEPTICAL ME, thought Isabel. But one has to be, because if one were not sceptical about things like this, then one would end up believing all sorts of untenable things. The list of traps for the gullible was a long one, and seemed to grow by the day: remote healing, auras, spoon-bending, extrasensory perception. Of course there was telepathy, which seemed to be something of an exception to these New Age enthusiasms; it had been around for so long that it had almost become respectable. So many people claimed to have had telepathic experiences—level-headed, rational people too—that there might be something in it. And yet had not Edinburgh University’s professor of parapsychology done exhaustive tests on telepathic communication and come up with—nothing? And if groups of volunteers, hundreds of them, could sit for hours in his laboratories and try to guess what card somebody in the next room was looking at, and never get above the level of chance in their replies, then how could people insist that it was anything more than coincidence that they thought of somebody the moment before that person telephoned? Chance; pure chance. But chance was a dull explanation because it denied the possibility of the paranormal, and people were often disappointed by dull explanations. Mystery and the unknown were far more exciting because they suggested that our world was not quite as prosaic as we feared it might be. Yet we had to abjure those temptations because they lead to a world of darkness and fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Houston, Grace,” said Isabel conversationally.

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

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

  “Depends on how you travel,” said Grace.

  Isabel did not give up. “I sometimes get Houston mixed up,” she said. “All these places. I get a bit confused.”

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

  Isabel was silent as they walked down the narrow lane that led past West Register House to Queensferry Road. It had been an extraordinary coincidence that she should have thought of Houston, of all places, at precisely the moment that the visitor from Houston was about to ask directions. And it was unnerving, too, that this had all taken place in the context of thoughts about telepathy, and, to add to the strangeness of the situation, while she was on her way, as Grace’s guest, to a séance at the spiritualist meeting rooms, where they would presumably love to hear about such a thing.

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

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

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

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

  Isabel sympathised. It was all very well living in an aged city, but the pleasure came with a large bill attached to it in the form of maintenance costs. And even the spiritualists would have to bear the burden of those; no help could come from the other side.

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

  “He lived all his life with his mother,” Grace whispered, once the man was out of earshot. “She crossed over a few months ago, and now he’s trying to get information from her about some bank accounts. He doesn’t know where the bank accounts were kept.” She shook her head. “That’s not what this is meant to be about. We’re not meant to get that sort of information. People on the other side are above all that. They give us messages about how to live our lives—useful things like that.”

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

  “He is,” said Grace.

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

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