Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Isabel settled herself back in the taxi seat. The key question in her mind was this: When their eyes had met in Sandy Bell’s, when Graeme had turned his head and seen her, had he looked surprised?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  GRACE BROUGHT the morning mail through to Isabel’s study. There were many more letters than usual, prompting a grimace from Grace as she laid the towering pile of envelopes and packages on the desk.

  Isabel gasped. If she were not there, how quickly would the mail pile up, gradually filling room after room, until the house itself was full. “What would happen if I went away, Grace? What if I went off to . . .” She did not continue. She was planning to go away, or almost planning to go away, with an Italian, no less, in a Bugatti. But she could hardly say that to Grace—just yet.

  “Twenty-five letters today,” said Grace. “I counted them. Ten manuscripts—ten! Four parcels that look like books, one of them extremely heavy. And eleven letters, of which three are bills, in my opinion.”

  Isabel thanked her. It had become something of a ritual in recent months for Grace to attend the opening of the mail and for Isabel to hand on to her those items that could be placed straight in the recycling pile. Some were placed in the pile unsullied; others were torn up by Grace according to a system of her own devising. She never tore up anything from the Conservatives, but the other parties were torn up or spared according to her view of their current performance.

  Isabel opened a letter with a neatly typed envelope. “My friend, Julian,” she said. She read the brief letter, laughing aloud at its conclusion.

  “I believe he’s serious,” she said, passing the letter to Grace. “An offer of a paper on the ethics of the buffet bar.”

  Grace read the letter and passed it back to Isabel. “Of course it’s theft,” she said. “Helping oneself to bread rolls like that. Surely he can see that.”

  “Julian Baggini is a subtle man,” said Isabel. “And his question is a serious one. Is it ethical to take extra bread rolls from the hotel buffet? And use them for your picnic lunch?”

  “Really,” Grace snorted. “Is that what your readers want to read about?”

  Isabel thought for a moment. “We could do a special issue on the ethics of food,” she mused. “We could use Julian’s paper there.”

  “The ethics of food?”

  Isabel picked up her paper-knife and stroked the edge. “Food is a more complex subject than one might think, you know. There is every reason why a philosopher should think about food.”

  “One of them being hunger,” retorted Grace.

  Isabel conceded the point. “Philosophers are no different from anybody else. Philosophers have their needs.” She looked at the letter again. “Buffet bars. Yes. I can just imagine the problems.”

  “Theft,” repeated Grace. “You shouldn’t take what’s not yours. Is there anything more you can say about it?”

  Isabel put her hands behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. Grace was in some matters, though not in others, a reductionist, a consummate wielder of Occam’s razor; which was a good thing, in a way.

  “But it’s not always clear what’s yours and what isn’t yours,” Isabel countered. “You may think that you’re entitled to that extra bread roll, but what if you’re not? What if the hotel intends that you should take only one?”

  “Then you’ve taken something that you think is yours, but which isn’t,” said Grace. “And that isn’t theft—at least it’s not theft in my book.”

  Isabel contemplated this for a moment. Two people go to a party, she thought, both with similar-looking umbrellas. One person leaves the party early. He takes an umbrella which he thinks is his, but he discovers when he gets home that it is the wrong one. That, she imagined, was not theft, in the moral sense at least, and surely it would not be theft in the legal sense. Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered a discussion with a lawyer about that, a sharp-nosed advocate who spoke in a deliberate, pedantic way but who had a mind like . . . well, Occam’s razor. He had said something about how the law allowed a defence of error, as long as one’s error was reasonable; which in itself seemed reasonable enough.

  “The law uses tests of reasonableness,” he had said, and he had proceeded to give her examples which had stuck in her mind.

  “Take causation,” he went on. “You’re responsible for those consequences of your acts which a reasonable person would foresee. You aren’t responsible for anything outside that. So let me tell you about a real case. A had assaulted B and B was lying on the ground, bleeding from a head wound. Along came C, who had attended a first-aid course. He had been taught about tourniquets and so he applied a tourniquet.”

  “To the neck?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. And the question was whether A was responsible for B’s death—which of course was by asphyxiation rather than loss of blood. What do you do about an unreasonable rescuer?”

  Isabel had managed to keep a straight face, but only just. This was, after all, a tragedy. “And was he?” she asked.

  The lawyer frowned. “Sorry,” he replied. “I can’t for the life of me remember the outcome. But here’s another one. A has a fight with B, who pushes him out of the window. A doesn’t fall very far as he’s wearing braces, or suspenders, as the Americans rather more accurately call them. These get caught on the balcony and he ends up suspended. A crowd gathers down below and a rescuer appears on the balcony. ‘Get him down,’ the crowd shouts. Whereupon the helpful rescuer cuts the elastic.”

  “That’s very sad,” said Isabel. “Poor man.”

  The lawyer had remembered the outcome of that case, and had told her. But now Isabel had forgotten what he said it was. She looked at Grace.

  “But do you think that the person who takes the extra roll thinks that he’s entitled to it?” she asked.

  “He may,” said Grace. “If I leave something on a table and say Help yourself, then surely you’re entitled to do just that.”

  “But what if I took everything?” objected Isabel. “What if I brought my suitcase down and filled it with food? Enough for a week?”

  “That would be selfish,” said Grace.

  Isabel nodded her agreement. “Very selfish,” she said. “And is selfishness wrong, or is it something which the virtuous person should merely avoid?” She thought for a moment. “Perhaps the solution is that the invitation to help yourself is subject to an implied limitation. What it means is Help yourself to what you need.”

  “For breakfast,” added Grace. “Help yourself to what you need for breakfast.”

  “Exactly,” said Isabel. “I’m not sure how far we can get with the ethics of the buffet bar, but there are some rather interesting problems there. Shall I write to Julian, or would you like to do that?”

  Grace laughed. “You, I think. Nobody would listen to me.”

  “They would listen to you,” Isabel said.

  Grace shuffled through the letters. “I don’t think so. And why should they? I’m just the cleaning lady to them.”

  “You’re not,” said Isabel stoutly. “You’re the housekeeper. And there’s a distinction.”

  “They wouldn’t think so,” said Grace.

  “There have been some very talented, very famous housekeepers,” said Isabel.

  Grace’s interest was aroused. “Oh yes? Such as?”

  Isabel looked at the ceiling for inspiration. “Oh well,” she said. And then she said “Well” again. She had made the comment without thinking, and now, when she put her mind to it, she could not come up with any. Who were the mute, unsung heroines? There must have been many, but now she could think only of the woman who had put Carlyle’s manuscript in the fire. She was a maid, was she not, or was she a housekeeper? Was there a distinction? She thought about it briefly and then decided that she was getting nowhere with anything, and the pile of mail was effectively as high as it had been before she had started to think about buffet bars, and bread rolls, and housekeepers.

  She looked a
t the next letter, but put it down again before opening it. Her mind had returned to the possible special issue on the ethics of food. There would have to be a paper on the moral issues raised by chocolate; the more she thought of it, the richer became the philosophical dimensions of chocolate. It brought akrasia, weakness of the will, into sharp focus. If we know that chocolate is bad for us (and in some respects chocolate is bad for us, in the sense that it makes us put on weight), then how is it that we end up eating too much of it? That suggests that our will is weak. But if we eat chocolate, then it must be that we think that it is in our best interests to do so; our will moves us to do what we know we will like. So our will is not weak—it is actually quite strong, and prompts us to do that which we really want to do (to eat chocolate). Chocolate was not simple.

  SHE WORKED SOLIDLY that day until three in the afternoon, when she telephoned Angus Spens at the Scotsman offices. Angus was not there to take her call, but he called back fifteen minutes later, when Isabel was in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea.

  “I saw you the other day,” she said. “You were getting into a taxi outside your office. You looked terribly smart, Angus, in your black coat. Very smart.”

  “I was off to interview another Stuart pretender,” he said. “We get these people turning up from time to time, claiming to be descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie or his dad. They’re a pretty motley crew, as you can imagine.”

  “Cranks?” asked Isabel.

  “Some of them,” said Angus. “The problem, as you no doubt know, is that Prince Charlie had no legitimate offspring. And his brother, who was a cardinal, enjoyed a very happy bachelor existence. He died full of years, but not exactly surrounded by descendants. So that was the end of the direct Stuart line. You learnt that in school, didn’t you? I certainly did.”

  “But not everybody wants to believe it?”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Angus sighed. “One of the problems of being in the newspaper business is that you get contacted by an awful lot of people who think the world is otherwise than we are told it is. They really believe that. And these Stuart people are a little bit like that. Some of them are perfectly reasonable people who really believe that they have a claim—and back it up with books on the subject. But others are fantasists, although every so often one comes along who appears to have a rather better claim. This one was an Italian and had been bombarding the Lord Lyon for ages with his papers. They took the view that he was at least who he said he was, and that there were interesting lines to explore, whatever they meant by that.”

  “And?”

  “And he turned out to be a most agreeable person to interview,” said Angus. “Very modest. Very charming. And you know what else? He bore a striking resemblance to James the sixth. It could have been old Jamie Sext himself sitting there. It was the bone structure, not the colouring. Just something about the cheekbones and the eyes. I was astonished.”

  “There’s a good few generations in between,” said Isabel.

  “Yes, but family looks go down the ages. Anyway, there he was, brimming with Jacobite enthusiasm. I wondered whether he imagined that the clans would rise again if the Lord Lyon pronounced in his favour.”

  “Well it was all rather romantic,” said Isabel.

  “And Jamie Sext was an interesting monarch. An intellectual. Probably bisexual, or, should one put it, he ruled both ways?”

  “You’re very amusing, Angus,” said Isabel drily. Then she laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to have had dinner with him?”

  Angus would not. “It would have been highly dangerous to have dinner with any Scottish king,” he said. “That is, until recently, if you can call the Hanoverians Scottish. No, I don’t think dinner would have been a good idea. Look at Darnley and what happened to Rizzio.”

  Isabel was not prepared to let this go. Rizzio, the Italian secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, had been murdered in Edinburgh before the Queen’s very eyes by a group of armed men. Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley, was said to have been one of the murderers, acting out of jealousy. But Isabel felt that there was inadequate proof of this.

  “Where exactly is your evidence, Angus?” she challenged. “You can’t go round defaming people like that. You do Darnley a great injustice.”

  Angus laughed. “How can you speak like that? This all happened in—when was it?—fifteen sixty-something. Can you do an injustice to somebody who hasn’t been with us for over four hundred years? Hardly.”

  Again Isabel felt that she had to protest. As it happened, she was interested in the philosophical issue of whether you can harm the dead. There was more than one view on that . . . but perhaps this was not the time.

  “I think that we shall have to come back to Lord Darnley some other time,” she said. “And in particular, I should like to discuss with you the precise circumstances of his own death, or murder, as it undoubtedly was. I have views on that, you know.”

  Isabel heard a sigh from the other end of the line. “Well, well, Isabel! So you might be able to solve that little issue. Now that would be a very good story. Can the Scotsman have the exclusive?”

  “That depends on your attitude,” she said. “But look, Angus, I didn’t telephone you to discuss Scottish history. I want to call in a favour.”

  Angus sounded surprised. “I thought you owed me . . . Remember . . .”

  “Let’s not count too scrupulously,” Isabel said hurriedly. “Just a small favour. A name, that’s all.”

  She told him what she wanted, and he listened quietly. She thought it would be easy, she said, and that surely he had his contacts in the health service or the hospital. Did he not have favours of his own to call in?

  “As it happens I do,” he said. “There’s a certain doctor who had very sympathetic coverage from us when he appeared before the General Medical Council on a complaint. I felt genuinely sorry for him and thought he was in the right. Some of the other papers went for him in a big way. He was very grateful to me.”

  “Ask him,” said Isabel.

  “All right, but I won’t press him if he’s at all unwilling.”

  They agreed that he would call her back if he heard anything, or even if he did not hear anything. Then they rang off, and Isabel turned to her cup of tea. She liked to mix Earl Grey with Darjeeling. Earl Grey by itself she found too scented; Darjeeling took the edge off that. Flowers and smoke, she thought, and wondered for a moment about what Mary, Queen of Scots drank. She made a mental note to ask her friend Rosalind Marshall about that; she knew everything about Scottish queens and wrote books about them, in her house in Morningside. Poor Mary—she had spent so much time locked up in castles, poor woman, working away at her elaborate French needlework and writing those rather poignant letters of hers. Drinking chocolate had reached Spain by then, but had probably not reached the Scottish court. And tea did not arrive until the beginning of the seventeenth century, she believed. So it must have been some sort of herbal infusion, then, although she thought they did not drink infusions for pleasure; there was French wine for that. Smoke and flowers, flavours of exile, and of a Scotland whose echoes one might just detect, now and then, in the lilt of a voice, in an old Scots word, in a shadow across the face, in a trick of the light.

  ANGUS DID PHONE, as he said he would, but much more quickly than Isabel had imagined. She had finished her second cup of tea and was about to take the cup to the sink when the telephone rang.

  “Here’s your name,” he said. “Macleod. Is that what you were after?”

  She stood quite still. In her left hand, the empty teacup tilted, allowing a few last drops to fall to the floor.

  “Isabel?”

  She had been thinking; over her second cup of tea she had been thinking about something else he had said, and now she wanted another name from him. “Thank you. But before you go, Angus, that Italian you interviewed—what was he called?”

  “One of those very long, aristocratic Italian names,” he said. “But I simply addressed him as To
masso.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ISABEL LEFT THE HOUSE and walked briskly along Merchiston Crescent to Bruntsfield. It was now shortly before seven, a good three hours after she had taken the telephone call from Angus with its two pieces of surprising information. And yet, three hours later, she could think of nothing else and wanted to talk to somebody. She had debated with herself as to whether she should contact Jamie, and had eventually decided to do so even if she had some misgivings. If she was looking for advice from him, then she had already had his opinion, which he had volunteered the day before on their walk to Holyrood. He had made it clear that there was nothing further that she could, or should, do. But that was before she had received the news from Angus. Now everything was different. Rose had deliberately concealed from her the fact that her son had been the donor. And that suggested, Isabel concluded, that she had something more significant to hide. The most likely explanation was that Rose knew about Graeme’s involvement in the death of her son and had decided to protect him. And if that were true, then Isabel felt that she should have no compunction in passing on the information she had, such as it was. There would be no danger in those circumstances of destroying the relationship between the two of them on a mere suspicion.

  It was a relief to her to know this. She could do what she had to do, and then start minding her own business once again. But taking the decision to do something was not quite so easy if one had to take it without discussing it with anybody. And the only person she could really discuss it with was Jamie. Nobody else knew about this, except for Ian, of course, and after the scare in Sandy Bell’s, when he seemed to be buckling under stress, she was unwilling to expose him to more anxiety.

  So it would have to be Jamie, and fortunately he had been free for dinner.