Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He trailed off.

  Isabel smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was feeling flippant. I don’t know why I said that.”

  Tomasso seemed confused. He turned to the waiter and asked him about one of the options, and was told about it. Isabel studied her menu. She was not sure what had prompted her curious comment. Perhaps it was the incongruity of the situation—

  that she was dining with the man who had been pursuing her niece, although he was her own age; who was so slick and elegant, and who had given the young male waiter what had struck her as an appreciative look. Yet none of that justified rudeness or a weak attempt to be funny.

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  She looked up from the menu and made a suggestion as to what they might have. The waiter, still eyeing her in a bemused way, agreed with her choice, and Tomasso nodded his assent. A bottle of chilled white wine, which Tomasso had chosen, was produced and their glasses filled.

  The earlier awkwardness soon passed. Tomasso spoke about his day in Edinburgh and about his plans to drive up to Glencoe.

  “Will Cat be going with you?” she asked. She knew the answer, but asked nonetheless.

  He looked into his glass, and she realised that there was an issue of pride; he was the rejected suitor—rejected gently, and with humour, no doubt, but rejected. “She will not,” he said. “She has the business to look after. She cannot leave that.” He sipped the wine. Then, his face brightening, as if an idea had just occurred, he said, “Perhaps you would care to accompany me? The Bugatti has two seats. It is not the most comfortable of cars, but it is very beautiful.”

  Isabel tried not to let her uncertainty show. “Glencoe?”

  “And beyond,” said Tomasso, describing a wide movement with a hand. “We could drive across that island—the large one—Skye? And then . . . and then there is so much more.

  There is so much of Scotland.”

  “But how long would we need to be away?” asked Isabel.

  Tomasso shrugged. “A week? Ten days? If you could not manage that, we could make it less. Five days?”

  She did not answer immediately. The last time that somebody had invited her to go away like this was when John Liamor had suggested Ireland, and they had caught the ferry to Cork.

  And that was in another life, she thought, or almost, and now 1 8 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h here she was, in this restaurant in Edinburgh with this man whom she hardly knew, being asked to go away.

  She picked up her wineglass. “We barely know one another,” she said.

  “Which makes it more of an adventure,” he said quickly.

  “But if you think . . .”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think that. It’s just that to drop everything and go off . . .”

  He reached out and touched her wrist, briefly, and then withdrew his hand. “But that is what makes it so exciting.”

  Isabel took a deep breath. “Let me think about it,” she said.

  “I need to think.”

  Her answer seemed to satisfy him. He sat back in his chair and smiled at her. “Please do,” he said. “I am in no hurry to leave Edinburgh. It is very—how should I put it?—very congenial.

  Does that sound right to you?”

  Isabel nodded. “It’s close enough.” She moved her fork and knife slightly so that they were parallel with each other; a small detail, perhaps, but that was what zero tolerance was all about.

  One started with the cutlery.

  Tomasso was staring at her, as if waiting for her to say something. Well, she decided, I can ask.

  “You’re in no hurry to get back to Italy,” she said. “May I ask: What do you actually do? Do you have a job to get back to, or . . .”

  The or hung ambiguously in the air, but he did not seem to mind. “We have a family company,” he said. “There are many people who work in it. They do not need me all the time.”

  “And what does this company do?” She was prepared for evasion, but somehow, face-to-face with him, what he, or the company, did seemed less important; a handsome face/absolves F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  disgrace, the words came to her unbidden, and original, too, she thought.

  “We make shoes,” said Tomasso. “Mostly shoes for ladies.”

  “Where?” Isabel asked. She asked the question, and knew it was abrupt, even rude.

  Tomasso did not appear to mind the examination. “We have two factories. One in the south,” he said. “And another in Milan. The designs all come from Milan.”

  “Ah yes,” said Isabel. “Cat told me about the shoes. I remember now.”

  Tomasso nodded. “She met many members of my family at the wedding. That is where I met her. At one of the parties.”

  “And that is when you decided that you would come to see her in Scotland?”

  His right hand moved to his left cuff, which he fingered.

  She noticed the manicured nails. There were no men in Scotland with manicured nails.

  “That is when I decided to come to Scotland,” he said. “I have one or two things to do here. Family things. But I also hoped to get to know Cat better. I did not think that she would be so busy.”

  “Perhaps she considers you too old for her,” said Isabel, and she thought, family things. What did he mean by family things?

  Mafia things?

  He did not react immediately. He looked down at the plate to his side, and dabbed at an imaginary crumb with a forefinger.

  Then: “In Italy, you know, it is not at all unusual for a man in his early forties—which is what I am—to marry a girl in her early twenties. That is normal, in fact.” He looked at her evenly, holding her gaze.

  “That’s interesting,” said Isabel. “It’s not normal here.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Maybe because we consider that equality is important in relationships. The woman in those circumstances will never be the equal of the man.”

  He drew back slightly at her comment, feigning surprise.

  “Equality? Who wants equality?”

  “I do, for one,” said Isabel.

  “Do you really?” he asked. “Are you sure about that? Don’t you find equality a little bit . . . well, dull?”

  Isabel thought for a moment. Yes, he was right. Equality was dull, and goodness was dull, too, if one reflected on it; and Nietz-sche, of course, would have agreed. Peace was dull; conflict and violence were exciting. And this man, sitting on the other side of the table from her, was far from dull.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is a bit dull. But then I’d probably prefer dullness to unfairness. I’d rather live in a society that was fair to its citizens than one in which there was great injustice. I’d rather live in Sweden than . . .” She had to think. What had happened to all the truly dreadful countries? Where were they? The usual whipping boys, exhausted by criticism, had caved in. But there were still places, were there not, where there were gross disparities of wealth and power. Paraguay? She had no idea.

  They had been saddled with a picture-book dictator, but had he not been deposed? Were there still vast latifundia there? And what about those Arab countries where sheikhs and princes viewed the public treasuries as their private purses? There was plenty of injustice that nobody talked about very much. There was slavery still; debt bondage; enforced prostitution; trafficking in children. It was all there, but the voices that spoke about it were so hard to hear amongst all the trivia and noise and the profound loss of moral seriousness.

  “Than where?” he pressed. “Than Italy?”

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  “Of course not. I would love to live in Italy.”

  He held his hands apart, in a gesture of welcome. “Why not come? Why not move to the hills above Florence, like all those other British ladies?”

  Perhaps he had intended the re
mark to be a compliment, or perhaps it had meant nothing very much. But he had said other British ladies, and that put her into the category of artistic spinsters and eccentrics who haunted places like Fiesole; not a glamorous set, but faded, chintzy, dreamy exponents of Botti-celli and Tuscan cookery; maiden aunts, actual or in the making. He had invited her to travel to the Highlands in his Bugatti, and she had almost accepted; but this, she thought, is how he sees me. I would be company; a guide; somebody to read the map and explain the massacre of Glencoe. And I, my head momentarily turned, had thought that I could possibly be of romantic or even sexual interest to this man.

  The waiter arrived with the first course. He placed the plate in front of her, scallops on a bed of shredded red and green peppers. As she looked at her plate, she teetered on the edge of self-pity, and then pulled back. Why should I agonise? she asked herself. Why should I always weigh the rights and wrongs of things? What if I just acted? What if I became, for a short time, the huntress and showed him that I was not what he imagined?

  What if I made a conquest?

  She looked up. The waiter had a pepper mill in his hand and was offering her pepper. This always irritated her; that the pro-prietors of restaurants should not trust their pepper mills to the hands of their guests. But it was not the waiter’s fault, and she dismissed the thought.

  She looked across the table. “I’d like to think about your offer of that trip,” she said. “Next week perhaps?”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She studied his reaction, watching for any sign. But he gave little away—little beyond the slightest twitch of a smile at the sides of his mouth and a brief change in the light in his eyes, a flicker, a change in reflection, brought about, no doubt, by a trick of light, a movement of the head.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

  E

  JAMIE DID NOT LIKE playing for the ballet. From where he sat in the orchestra pit, just beneath the overhang of the stage, he found the sound of the dancers’ feet disconcerting. This is what it would be like to live, he thought, on the first floor, with noisy neighbours on the second. But it was work, and well-paid work at that, and he thought it better than listening to his pupils. That afternoon, on the day after Isabel’s dinner with Tomasso, he had played for the Scottish Ballet in a matinée performance, and had agreed to meet Isabel in the Festival Theatre café after the show.

  She had to talk to him, she explained. And he had begun to ask, “About . . . ,” and then had stopped, because he knew what it was about, without having to ask. “Tell me when we meet,” he said, and added, as an afterthought, “You haven’t done anything unwise, have you, Isabel?”

  Isabel realised that the answer to that was yes, but did not say so. She had virtually agreed to go off to the Highlands with an almost complete stranger (not that she intended to tell Jamie about that—just yet); she had impersonated a medium; she had reduced Graeme, on first meeting, to a state of tight-lipped 1 8 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h enmity; all of which, she thought, was unwise. And while her sense of moral obligation lay behind two of these bad decisions, behind the other one lay nothing but a sudden urge to show bravado. And yet that very act, the reckless flirtation with Tomasso (a flirtation on her side, now, if not yet on his), was the one unwise thing of the three that she did not regret. Indeed, the mere thought of it was pleasurable: a shameless, erotic challenge, a delectable fantasy. My Italian lover, she would be able to say; and then, with regret: Yes, I used him, I confess I did. Of course, she would never be able to utter that to anybody, although she might think it in private, and find comfort in the thought. My Italian lover— how many women would love to be able to say that to themselves, when confronted with the hum-drum, the brute limitations of their lives: Yes, I know, I know—

  but I have had an Italian lover.

  In the café at the Festival Theatre, Isabel looked out through the glass wall to the Royal College of Surgeons on the other side of the road. A small cluster of men and women was emerging from the gate at the side of the college, examinees poring over a piece of paper. One of the men jabbed at the paper with a finger, making some remark to the others. There was a shaking of heads, and Isabel felt a pang of sympathy: What had the poor man suggested? Removing the wrong organ? These were doctors who came from their hospital posts all over the world to attempt the fellowship examinations, and only a small number passed. She had heard a surgeon friend comment on it: seven—

  out of sixty hopefuls, sometimes—invited to join the Fellows in some inner sanctum, the rest politely dispersed. The doctor who had gestured to the paper looked down at the ground; a woman beside him put her hand on his shoulder to comfort him. There would be a melancholy homecoming.

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  Jamie slipped into the chair beside her; she turned and he was there, smiling in the way she found so appealing. “Arvo Pärt,” he said.

  “Very slow,” she said. “Silences. Repetitive pätterns.”

  He laughed. “Exactly. But I enjoy it, you know. This ballet we’ve just done uses a piece he wrote called Psalom. Gorgeous ärchitecture.”

  “So you’re feeling in a good mood?”

  He scratched his head and looked out onto the street. “I think so,” he said. “Yes, in fact I am in a good mood. Are you going to spoil it for me? Has something happened?”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” said Isabel. “I feel a bit cooped up. We could talk while we’re walking. Do you mind?”

  Jamie left his bassoon with a young woman at the ticket desk and joined Isabel on the pavement outside the theatre.

  They crossed the road and made their way down Nicolson Street to South Bridge. They passed Thin’s Bookshop, as Isabel still called it, and turned down Infirmary Street. The Old College of the university towered above and behind them, a great quadrangle of grey stone. Above the dome, a gleaming statue of a naked youth, torch in hand, caught the late afternoon sun, gold against the high background of cloud. Isabel tended to look up when she walked round Edinburgh, because that was where the forgotten delights were—the carved stone thistles, the Scottish gargoyles straddling roof gables, the all but obliterated signs of the nineteenth century: pens, inks, loans—a palimpsest of the life and commerce of the town.

  Jamie was talking about the Arvo Pärt and about his next engagement, a concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

  Isabel listened. She had her own topics which she wanted to raise with him, but Jamie was still exhilarated by the perfor-1 8 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h mance and she was content to let him talk. At the end of Infirmary Street the road dipped down sharply to the Cowgate, a cobbled slide for incautious cars and pedestrians. They branched off behind the morgue, heading for the stone steps that descended beside a shabby tenement block. There was broken glass on the steps and the large abandoned buckle of a belt.

  “Things happen in this city,” said Jamie, glancing at the buckle.

  “They do,” said Isabel. “You turn a corner, take a few steps, and you’re in a different world.” She pointed behind her to the statue on the high dome of the university. “He’s carrying a lighted torch for a reason.”

  Jamie glanced behind him and for a moment his expression clouded over. He looked at Isabel. Then he stared at the wall of the tenement beside them, a place of poverty and hardship still, and at the steps worn down by the feet of centuries.

  “This is all very different from the Pärt,” he said. “Music always is. You can exist for a while in a world of music and then you walk out into the street and the street reminds you that this is what is real.” He stared at her for a moment, in a silence of friends. “What’s happened, Isabel?”

  She took his arm gently. She did not touch Jamie very often, although she wanted to, but now she took his arm and they went down the remaining steps together. She explained to him about the meeting with Rose in the delicatessen
, and Rose’s disclosure that her son had not been the donor. He listened attentively as they walked down to Holyrood Road.

  Then, when she finished, they stood still. They were standing opposite the offices of the Scotsman, facing the large glass building with its backdrop of crags and hill.

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  “I don’t know what you’re worrying about,” said Jamie.

  “This character, Ian, has simply been hallucinating, or whatever you call it. It just so happens that the hallucination took a form which fitted that woman’s partner. That’s what we call coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “And so what do I do?” asked Isabel.

  Jamie leant forward and tapped Isabel’s wrist with a forefinger. “You do absolutely nothing. Nothing. You’ve done what you can for that man and you’ve come up against a dead end.

  You don’t want to go chasing after the real donor . . .”

  She stopped him. “The real donor?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Well, he got the heart from somebody.

  You jumped to conclusions too quickly. There must have been another sudden death involving a young man. You saw the one that happened to be in the Evening News. But not everybody who dies ends up in the Evening News or the Scotsman. Some deaths are unreported. Some people don’t put notices in the paper.”

  She said nothing. He looked at her, waiting for her to speak, but she did not. She was staring at the Scotsman building, watching a man in a black overcoat make his way out of the revolving door and down the steps to a taxi that was waiting for him at the kerb.

  “I could ask him,” she muttered.

  “Who?”

  Isabel pointed. “Him. Over there. I know him. Angus Spens. He’s a journalist on the Scotsman. He can find anything out. Anything. All we need from him is a name. That’s all.”

  “But why would he do this for you?”

  “It’s complicated,” said Isabel. “We used to share a bath 1 9 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h together.” She laughed. “When we were five. My mother and his mother were very close. We saw a lot of each other.”