Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Jamie beamed with pleasure. “The London Symphony!” he said. “Good, isn’t it?”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel tried to smile. Perhaps I’ve managed a down-turned smile, she thought, one of those smiles where the lips go down at the side. A rueful smile; full of rue, of sorrow.

  “Where will you live in London?” she enquired. “Not that it’ll mean much to me. My geography of London is pretty shaky.

  North of the river? South of the river? And don’t some people actually live on the river? Londoners and New Yorkers and people like that are so resourceful. They live in all sorts of caves and corners. Look at the Queen; she lives at the back of a palace . . .”

  Jamie cut her short. “Some people live in houseboats,” he said. “I know somebody who has one. Pretty damp way to live.

  No, I’m not going to live in London.”

  “You’ll commute?” asked Isabel. “What about concerts finishing late? Don’t the trains stop? And what happens if you try to talk to your fellow commuters? If the silence gets too much for you? Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It’s the second biggest cause of death amongst the English in general. Sheer boredom . . .”

  “I’m not going, Isabel,” said Jamie. “Sorry, I should have told you right at the beginning. I’m not going to take the job.”

  It took her a moment to react to what he had said. Her first feeling was one of joy, that she was not going to lose him after all. It was simple joy.

  “I’m so glad,” she said. And then, correcting herself, she said quickly, “But why? Why go for the audition if you didn’t want the job?”

  Jamie explained that he had wanted the job, and that he had spent half the rail journey back thinking about when he would move and where he would live and so on. But the other half, from York onwards, was spent making up his mind to decline the offer.

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  “By the time I reached Edinburgh, my mind was made up,”

  he said. “I decided to stay.”

  There was a tone of finality in his voice. Isabel hesitated for a moment; the simplest thing to do would be to say that she thought this was a good idea and leave it at that. But she was curious as to why he should have changed his mind. And then it came to her. Cat. He would not leave Edinburgh as long as he entertained a hope that Cat might change her mind about him.

  “It’s Cat,” she said quietly. “It is her, isn’t it?”

  Jamie met her eyes, but then looked away in embarrassment. “Maybe. Maybe . . .” He trailed off. Then: “Yes,” he said.

  “It is. When I faced up to it, as I did on the train, that was what I decided. I don’t want to leave her, Isabel. I just don’t.”

  From the heights of the elation she had experienced when Jamie had announced that he would not go to London after all, Isabel now descended to the depths of doubt. Once again the problem lay in the fact that she was a philosopher and that she thought about duty and obligation. From the selfish point of view she should say nothing; but Isabel was not selfish. And so she felt compelled to say to Jamie that he should not turn down something that was important to him in the hope, the vain hope, she had to say, that Cat would come back to him.

  “She won’t come back to you, Jamie,” she said softly. “You can’t spend your life hoping for something that is never going to happen.”

  Every word of her advice went against the grain of what she herself wanted. She wanted him to stay; she wanted things to remain as they were; she wanted him for herself. But in spite of this, she knew that she had to say the opposite of what she wanted.

  She could tell that her words were having their effect, as he 2 2 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h remained silent, staring at her, his eyes wide. His eyes had in them a light which seemed to dim now, to change its quality.

  What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was? But it was more than that. It was a glimpse of what life might be if there were no disharmony, no loss, no death. She wanted to reach out, to touch his cheek and say, Jamie, my beautiful Jamie, but she could not, of course. She could neither say what she wanted to say, nor do what she wanted to do. Such is the lot of the philosopher, and most of the rest of us, too, if we are honest with ourselves.

  When Jamie spoke, he spoke quietly. “Just keep out of it, Isabel,” he said, between clenched teeth. “Just mind your own business.”

  She drew back, shocked by his intensity. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was only trying . . .”

  “Please shut up,” said Jamie, his voice raised. “Just shut up.”

  His words cut into her, hung in the air. She looked anxiously in the direction of the neighbouring table. There was no sign of anything having been heard, but he must have heard, the man with the book.

  Then Jamie pushed his chair back, noisily, and stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t feel in the mood for dinner tonight.”

  She could not believe it. “You’re going?”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  She sat alone at the table, frozen in her embarrassment.

  The waiter came to the table swiftly and discreetly pushed Jamie’s chair back against the table. His manner was sympathetic. And then, crossing quietly from the other side of the restaurant, Peter Stevenson was at her side, bending down to whisper to her.

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  “Come over and join us,” he said. “We can’t let you have dinner by yourself.”

  Isabel looked up at him in gratitude. “I think the evening’s rather ruined for me,” she said.

  “Surely there was no need for your friend to walk out like that,” said Peter.

  “It’s my fault,” said Isabel. “I said something that I shouldn’t.

  I touched the very rawest of nerves. I shouldn’t have done it.”

  Peter placed a hand on her shoulder. “We all say things,”

  he said. “Phone him tomorrow and patch up. It’ll look different then.”

  “I don’t know,” said Isabel. She decided that some explanation was necessary. At the beginning of the evening she had rather relished the thought that people might imagine that she was with a younger lover; now she was not so sure whether that was what she would want people to believe.

  “He and I are only friends,” she said to Peter. “I wouldn’t want you to think that there was anything more to it than that.”

  Peter smiled. “How disappointing! Susie and I have just been admiring your choice in men.” He looked at her mischievously.

  “We were also hoping that this might mean you were spending less time fussing about ethical issues, and more time enjoying yourself.”

  “I don’t seem to be terribly good at enjoying myself,” said Isabel. “But thanks for the advice.” She hesitated; yes, he was right—she should enjoy herself. And for that, well, there was Tomasso. She could think about him, and their planned trip away together; that moment of—what was it?—irresponsibility?

  No, she would look upon it as a moment of perfectly rational decision.

  Peter nodded in the direction of his table. “Come along,” he 2 2 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h said. “Join us. That’s Hugh and Pippa Lockhart at our table.

  They met playing together in the Really Terrible Orchestra with us. She’s less terrible at the trumpet than he is—in fact, she’s quite good. You’ll like them. Come on.”

  She rose to her feet. The remains of the evening could be salvaged, a small scrap of dignity recovered. She had had misunderstandings with Jamie before, and she would apologise to him tomorrow. And then she reminded herself who she was.

  She was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was not a love-struck girl abandoned by a petulant boyfriend. These were restorative thoughts, and her mood lifted. She had done her duty
and given him the advice that she was morally obliged to give him, so she had nothing to reproach herself for there.

  And, besides all this, she had the overwhelmingly good news that he would not be leaving Edinburgh. It was as if a weather warning had been lifted. There had been a mistake: winter was cancelled and we would move straight to spring.

  So she crossed the restaurant to join Peter and Susie, oblivious to the furtive, pitying glances from those who had witnessed the sudden departure of Jamie. She held her head high; she had no need of pity. She might apologise to Jamie tomorrow, but she had no reason to apologise to these people. Edinburgh was a nosy town. People should mind their own business.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

  E

  SHE LIKED THE ROAD out to West Linton, and always had.

  It snaked round the side of the Pentland Hills, past old farm-steads and fields of grazing sheep, past steep hillsides of heather and scars of scree, past Nine Mile Burn and Carlops; and all the while, to the south-east, the misty Lammermuirs, blue and distant, crouched against the horizon. It was a drive that was too short for her, for the thoughts that she wanted to think on such a road, and she would gladly, if ridiculously, have doubled back and turned round and done it all over again so that she could prolong the pleasure. But she had a mission, a meeting with Jean Macleod, whom she had phoned and asked to see. She had said, I need to talk to you about your son, the son you lost, and the woman at the other end of the line had caught her breath and been silent for a moment before she said that Isabel could come and see her.

  The village of West Linton clung to the side of a hill. The Edinburgh road followed a high contour, with the village itself hugging the hillside down to the low ground below. On either side of the Edinburgh road there were Victorian villas, houses with wide gardens and conservatories and names that one might 2 3 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h see in any small town in Scotland, names redolent of a douce Scotland of golf and romanticism. It was not Isabel’s world; she was urban, not small town, but she knew it to be the Scottish hinterland, ignored by the cities, condescended to by the urban-ites, but still there. It was a Scotland of quiet manners and reserved friendliness, a Scotland in which nothing much happened, where lives were lived unadventurously, and sometimes narrowly, to the grave. The lives of such people could be read in the local kirkyard, their loyalty and their persistence etched into granite: Thomas Anderson, Farmer of East Mains, Beloved Husband of fifty-two years of . . . and so on. These were people with a place, wed to the very ground in which they would eventually be placed. The urban dead were reduced to ashes, disposed of, leaving no markers, and then forgotten; memory here was longer and gave the illusion that we counted for more. It was a simple matter of identity, thought Isabel. If people do not know who we are, then naturally we are the less to them. Here, in this village, everybody would know who the other was, which made that crucial difference.

  She branched off the main road and slowly wound her way down into the village. On either side of the narrow main street, small stone buildings rose—houses, shops, a pocket-sized hotel.

  There was a bookshop run by somebody she knew, and she would call in there afterwards, but for now she had to find the Wester Dalgowan Cottage, to which Jean Macleod had given her careful directions.

  It was just off the road that led towards Peebles and Moffat—a small house constructed from the grey stone of the valley, at the end of a short section of potholed, unpaved track. Behind it the open fields stretched away to the south; in front of it a small patch of untended garden, suffocated by thriving rhodo-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  dendrons, gave the house privacy from the road. An old Land Rover, painted in British racing green, was parked beside the house.

  The front door opened as Isabel approached it and Jean Macleod stepped out to greet her visitor. They shook hands, awkwardly, and Isabel noticed that Jean’s skin was rough and dry. The hands of a farmer, she thought.

  “You found your way,” said Jean. “People often drive right past us and end up on the Moffat road.”

  “I know the village a bit,” said Isabel. “I occasionally come out to see Derek Watson at his bookshop. I like this place.”

  “It’s changing,” said Jean. “But we’re happy enough. We used to be quite an important little town, you know. When they drove the cattle down to the Borders. Then we went to sleep for a century or so.”

  Jean ushered her into the front room of the cottage, a small sitting room furnished simply but comfortably. There was a table at one side piled with papers and journals. Isabel noticed a copy of the Veterinary Journal and drew her conclusions. Jean noticed her glance. “Yes,” she said. “I’m a vet. I help out in a practice near Penicuik. It’s small animal work. I used to do a lot of horses, but nowadays . . .” She left the sentence unfinished.

  She looked out of the window, out towards the fields on the other side of the road.

  Isabel had learnt from her visit to the other Macleod. She would be direct now.

  “I’m very sorry about your son,” she said. “I don’t know you and I didn’t know him. But I’m sorry.”

  Jean nodded. “Thank you.” She looked at Isabel, waiting for her to continue. But then she said, “I take it that you’re one of the bipolar support group. Have you got a child affected by it?”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h The question made clear the nature of the illness to which the newspaper notice had referred.

  “No,” said Isabel. “I haven’t. I know what that’s all about, but I haven’t.”

  Jean looked puzzled. “Then, forgive my asking, but why have you come to see me?”

  Isabel held her gaze. “I’ve come because chance brought me into contact with somebody who has had a heart transplant.”

  Jean’s reaction to Isabel’s words made it clear that Jamie’s assumption had been correct. For a brief while she said nothing, but seemed to grasp for words. Then she moved over to the window and stood quite still, looking away from Isabel, gripping the windowsill with both hands. When she spoke her voice was low, and Isabel had to strain to hear what she said.

  “We asked for privacy,” she said. “We very specifically did not want to meet whoever it was. We did not want to prolong the whole agony of it.”

  Suddenly she spun round, her eyes showing her anger. “I said yes, they could use the heart. But that was it. I didn’t want my other son to know. I didn’t want my daughter to know. It seemed to me that it would just make it all the more difficult for them. Another thing to come to terms with—that somebody else had a bit of their brother. That a bit of their brother was still alive.”

  Isabel was silent. It was not for her, she thought, to tell others how to deal with this most intimate of tragedies. One could debate the matter at great length in the bioethical literature, but those who wrote of honesty and disclosure and the nobility of gift might not have lost a brother.

  Jean sat down again, staring at her hands. “So, what do you want of me?” she asked.

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  Isabel waited a moment before she answered, but when Jean looked up again she spoke. Then she told her of her conversations with Ian and of Ian’s anguish. “I know it sounds fanciful,” she said. “You’re a scientist, after all. You know that tissue is tissue and that memory, consciousness, is something else altogether. I know this just doesn’t make any sense. But that man, that man whose life your son saved, is experiencing what he claims to be experiencing.”

  Isabel was going to say a bit more, but Jean had raised a hand to stop her. “It’s his father,” she said flatly. “That description is of my husband. Or it sounds like him.”

  It was a repetition, Isabel thought, of what had happened before. She found it hard to believe. Coincidence piled upon coincidence. Names. Faces. All coincidence.

  Jean had risen to her feet an
d opened the drawer in the table behind her. “My husband will be my ex-husband, I suppose, in a few months. When the lawyers get a move on.” She paused, riffling through papers. Then she extracted a small coloured photograph of the sort used for passport applications and passed it to Isabel. “That’s him.”

  Isabel took the photograph and looked at it. A pleasant-looking, open-faced man stared at the camera. There was a high forehead, and the eyes were slightly hooded. She looked for a scar, but could not see one; there was not enough resolution in the picture. She handed back the photograph and Jean tossed it into the drawer.

  “I don’t know why I should keep that,” she said. “There’s a lot of his stuff in the house. I’ll get round to clearing things out one of these days, I suppose.”

  She closed the drawer and turned to face Isabel again. “You don’t know what happened, do you? Has anybody told you?”

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  “All I know is what I’ve told you,” said Isabel. “I know nothing about you, or your son. Nothing.”

  Jean sighed. “My son had not seen his father for months—

  almost a year, in fact. When Euan—that’s my husband—left us, both of my sons refused to have anything more to do with him.

  They were angry. I thought they would come round, but they did not. And so when my Gavin died—and it was the depressive illness that killed him, of course, he was in a very deep depression when he took his own life—he had not seen or talked to his father for a long time. He died in a state of estrangement. And Euan, you know, did not come to the memorial service. He did not attend his own son’s service.” She spoke slowly, but in a con-trolled way, looking at Isabel as she talked. “I assume that he felt massively guilty, and I suppose I feel sorry for him. But there we are. It’s done. It’s over. He has to live with his feelings now.”

  She looked helplessly at Isabel. “He can’t bring himself to approach me for help. So that’s it. He still lives in the village, you know. So we have to try to avoid seeing each other. He drives out the other way, although it’s longer for him to get to his practice—he’s a vet, too. He can’t face the children.”