Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He put the newspaper to the side. “You’re busy.”

  She looked about her. “I prefer it that way. I find that I quite like being busy.”

  “I used to,” he said. “I used to be busy and now I mark time, reading the papers, doing the shopping for my wife.”

  She had not anticipated the reference to a wife; men who sat by themselves in delicatessens were likely to be single.

  “She works?”

  “Like me, a psychologist. Or at least, I used to be a psychologist. I gave it up just before the operation.”

  Isabel nodded. “A good idea, I suppose, if one has been very ill. There’s no point—”

  “In hastening one’s appointment at Mortonhall Crematorium,” he interjected. “No, I stopped, and found that I didn’t miss it in the least.”

  Isabel broke her bagel in two and took a bite out of one of the pieces.

  “I still read the professional journals,” he said, watching her eat. “It makes me feel that I’m on top of the subject, not that there is anything completely new and suprising to be said in psychology. I’m not at all sure that our understanding of human behaviour has progressed a great deal since Freud—awful admission though that is.”

  “Surely we know a bit more. What about cognitive science?”

  He raised an eyebrow. Her reference to cognitive science was clearly not what he expected of a woman working in a delicatessen, but then he remembered that she was a philosopher. Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef really what you want?

  He picked at a lettuce leaf. “Cognitive science has helped,” he said. “Yes, of course, we know much more about how the brain works and how we see the world. But behaviour is rather more than that. Behaviour is tied up with personality and how our personalities make us do what we do. That stuff is all very messy and not just a simple matter of neural pathways and the rest.”

  “And then there’s genetics,” said Isabel, taking another bite of her bagel. “I thought that behavioural genetics might explain a great deal of what we do. What about all those twin studies?”

  “My name’s Ian, by the way,” he said, and she said: Isabel Dalhousie, with an emphasis on the Dalhousie. “Yes, those twin studies. Very interesting.”

  “But don’t they prove that whatever the environmental influences, people behave as they do because of heredity?”

  “They do not,” Ian said. “All that they show is that there is a genetic factor in behaviour. But it’s not the only factor.”

  Isabel was not convinced. “But I read somewhere or other about these pairs of separated twins that keep turning up in America. And when they look at them they discover that they like the same colours and vote the same way and say the same sort of thing to the researchers.”

  Ian laughed. “Oh yes, it’s wonderful stuff. I’ve read some of the papers from Minnesota. In one of them they found that twins who had been separated at birth had actually both married women of the same name, divorced them at roughly the same time, and then remarried. And the second wives of each man had the same name. Two Bettys or whatever to begin with, and then two Joans.” He paused. “But then, Middle America’s full of Bettys and Joans.”

  “Even so, the odds are very much against it,” said Isabel. “Two Bettys is not too unlikely, but then to pick two Joans. I’m no statistician, but I should imagine that would be astronomically unlikely.”

  “But the unlikely can happen, you know,” said Ian. “And that, of course, can change everything we believe in. Single white crow, you see.”

  Isabel looked at him blankly, and he continued: “That’s something said by William James. The finding of a single white crow would disprove the theory that all crows are black. It’s quite a pithy way of making the point that it won’t take much to disprove something which we take as absolutely firmly established.”

  “Such as the proposition about black crows.”

  “Precisely.”

  Isabel glanced at Ian. He was looking away from her, out through the window of the shop. Outside, in the street, a bus had stopped to disgorge a couple of passengers: a middle-aged woman in a coat which looked too warm for the day, and a young woman in a T-shirt with a legend bleached out in the wash.

  “You’re looking worried,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  He turned back to face her. “I came across that quote from William James in an article recently,” he said. “Something rather close to home.”

  She waited for him to continue. He had picked up his newspaper and folded it again, running a finger down the crease. “It was used as an introduction to an article about the psychological implications of transplant surgery, a subject obviously of some interest to me.”

  Isabel felt that she should encourage him. “Well, I can imagine that these are major. It must be a massive disturbance for the system. All surgery is to some degree.”

  “Yes, of course it is. But this article was about something very specific. It was about cellular memory.”

  She waited for him to explain, but instead he looked at his watch. “Look,” he said, “I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to dash. I agreed to meet my wife ten minutes ago, and she has to get back to her office. I can’t keep her.”

  “Of course,” said Isabel. “You’d better go.”

  Ian rose to his feet, picking up his newspaper and the empty salad tub. “Could I speak to you about this? Could I discuss it with you later? Would you mind?”

  There was something in his tone which spoke of vulnerability, and Isabel thought that she could not refuse his request, even if she had wanted to. But, in fact, her curiosity had been aroused; curiosity, her personal weakness, the very quality which had led her into such frequent interventions in the lives of others and which she simply could not resist. And so she said: “Yes, by all means.” And she scribbled her telephone number on the top of his newspaper and invited him to call her and arrange a time to come round to the house for a glass of wine, if his regime allowed for that.

  “It does,” he said. “A minuscule glass of wine, almost invisible to the naked eye.”

  “The sort they serve in Aberdeen,” said Isabel.

  “Very appropriate,” he said, smiling. “I’m from Aberdeen.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel hurriedly. “I’ve always found Aberdonians very generous.”

  “Perhaps we are,” he said, adding, “in a frugal sort of way. No, wine is all right, in small quantities. But I have to avoid chocolate apparently. And that’s very hard. Even the thought of chocolate is difficult for me. It sets up such a yearning.”

  Isabel agreed with this. “Chocolate involves major philosophical problems,” she said. “It shows us a lot about temptation and self-control.” She thought for a moment. There was a lot that one might say about chocolate, if one thought about it. “Yes,” she concluded, “chocolate is a great test, isn’t it?”

  THE AFTERNOON PASSED as the morning had, in a flurry of business. Again Isabel was tired by the time she locked the front door and drew down the shutters. Eddie had left a few minutes early for some reason—he had mumbled an explanation which Isabel had not quite caught—and Isabel had shut everything up herself. She glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock, and she had still to call Jamie. But she thought that if she did so now, then there would be a chance that Louise might be there and it would be difficult for him to talk, if he wanted to talk to her, of course. The previous evening had been a social disaster. After Isabel had brought up the issue of the husband, with her inexcusably mischievous question, Louise had become more or less silent, and had not responded to the question. The tactic had worked, though, Isabel realised, and although Louise persisted with her air of studied boredom, it was obvious that she had a new understanding of her hostess. Jamie had been flustered and had gulped down his wine before suggesting that it was time that they we
nt on to Balerno. The farewells at the front door had been perfunctory.

  Isabel had almost immediately regretted her rudeness, for it was simple rudeness to embarrass a guest, no matter what provocation the guest had offered. It had been a petty action, and not one from which she was likely to benefit. The bonds of friendship might appear strong, but she understood that there was nothing easier to break than friendship, with all its expectations. One might ignore a friend, or let him down, but you could not do something deliberate to hurt him.

  An apology could not be put off. Isabel remembered her father making this point when he considered Japan’s apology to China for what it did in Manchuria. Forty years is slightly late, he had observed, adding, but I suppose one doesn’t want to rush these things.

  “Jamie?”

  There was a slight hesitation at the other end of the line, which is always a sign of resentment. This was the So it’s you pause.

  “Yes.”

  She took a deep breath. “You can guess why I’m calling.” Another moment of silence. Of course he could guess.

  “No,” he said.

  “About last night, and my bad behaviour. All I can say is that I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Jealousy, maybe.”

  He came in quickly. “Why should you be jealous?”

  He doesn’t know, she thought. He has no idea. And this should not surprise her.

  “I value your friendship, you see,” she said. “One can see other people as a threat to a friendship, and I thought . . . well, I’m afraid I thought that Louise was not in the slightest bit interested in me and that she would cut me out of your life. Yes, I suppose that’s what I felt. Do you think you can understand that?”

  She paused, and she heard Jamie’s breathing. Now there was silence, each uncertain whose turn it was to speak.

  “Nobody is going to cut anybody out,” Jamie began. “Anyway, things did not go well last night. It had nothing to do with you. We had an argument even before we came to see you. Then things got worse, and I’m afraid that’s more or less it.”

  Isabel looked up at the ceiling. She had not dared to hope for this, but it was exactly what she had wished for, subconsciously perhaps, and it had occurred much sooner than she would have thought possible. People fell in and out of love rather quickly, of course; it could happen within minutes.

  “What a pity,” whispered Isabel. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re not,” said Jamie sharply.

  “No,” said Isabel. “I’m not.” She paused. “You’ll find somebody else. There are plenty of girls.”

  “I don’t want plenty of girls,” Jamie retorted. “I want Cat.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “AND SALVATORE?” asked Isabel. “Tell me all about Salvatore.”

  “Charming,” said Cat, meeting Isabel’s eye. “Exactly as I told you he was.”

  They were sitting in the gazebo in Isabel’s back garden that Sunday afternoon, shortly after Cat’s return from Italy. It was an unusually warm day for Edinburgh, where summer is unpredictable and where the occasional warm day is something to be savoured. Isabel was used to this, and although she bemoaned, as everybody did, the tendency of the sky to disappear behind sheets of fast-moving cloud, she found a temperate climate more to her taste than a Mediterranean one. Weather was a test of attitude, she felt: had Auden not pointed that out? Nice people, he observed, were nice about the weather; nasty people were nasty about it.

  Cat was a heliophile, if there was such a word for a sun-worshipper, she thought. Italy in the summer must have suited her perfectly; a climate of short shadows and dry breezes. Cat liked beaches and warm seas, while Isabel found such things dull. She could think of nothing worse than sitting for hours under an umbrella, an open invitation to sandflies, looking out to sea. She wondered why it was that people did not talk on beaches; they sat, they lay prone, they read, but did they engage in conversation? Isabel thought not.

  She remembered, years before, at the end of her spell at Georgetown, a visit she had paid to the Bahamas with her mother’s sister, the one who lived in Palm Beach. This aunt had bought, almost on impulse, an apartment in Nassau, to which she travelled once or twice a year. She had made there a group of bridge-playing friends, bored and unhappy tax exiles, and Isabel had met these people at drinks parties. They had little to say, and there was little to be said about them. And on one occasion, visiting the house of one of these bridge couples, she had been seized with a sudden existential horror. The house had white carpets and white furniture and, most significantly, no books. And they sat on the terrace, which was just above a small private beach, and looked out towards the ocean, and nothing was said, because nobody could think of anything to speak about.

  “Beaches,” said Isabel to Cat.

  “Beaches?”

  “I was thinking about Italy, and the weather, and beaches came into my mind.” She looked at Cat. “And I suddenly remembered going to the Bahamas and meeting some people who lived on a beach.”

  “Beach people?”

  Isabel laughed. “Not in that sense. Not people who had a tent or whatever and let their hair get full of salt and all the rest. No, these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import, and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one.

  “He had lived in England and had left the country because he couldn’t bear to pay taxes to a socialist government, or to any government, I suspect. And there they were on their Caribbean island, sitting on their terrace, with their heads full of nothing very much.

  “They had a daughter, who was a young teenager when I saw her. She was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. So they withdrew her from her expensive school in En-gland and brought her back to the island. She took up with a local boy whom the parents wouldn’t let into the house, with its white carpets and all the rest. They tried to stop her, but they couldn’t. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either. But they didn’t want their daughter’s baby, and I later heard that they just pretended that the baby didn’t exist. It crawled around on the white carpets, but they didn’t really see it.”

  Cat looked at Isabel. She was used to her relative’s musings, but this one surprised her. Usually Isabel’s stories had a clear moral point, but she was not sure what the moral point of this one was. Emptiness, perhaps; or the need for a purpose in life; or the immorality of tax havens. Or even babies and white carpets.

  “Salvatore was quite charming,” said Cat. “He took us all out for a meal at a restaurant in the hills. It was one of the places where they give you very little choice but just bring course after course.”

  “They’re generous people, the Italians,” Isabel remarked.

  “And his father was very kind, too,” went on Cat. “We went to their house and met all the relatives. Aunts, uncles, and so on. Crowds of them.”

  “I see,” said Isabel. There was still the question of Salvatore’s father’s occupation. “And did you find out what the family business was?”

  “I asked,” said Cat. “I asked one of the uncles. We were sitting under the pergola in the garden, having lunch—a large table with about twenty people at it. I asked Salvatore’s uncle.”

  “And?” She imagined the uncle saying that he was not sure what his brother did; or that he had forgotten. One could not forget such a thing, just as one could not forget one’s address, as a Russian once claimed to Isabel when she asked him where he lived. He was frightened, poor man; those were times when one might not want one’s address in a foreigner’s address book, but it might have been better for him to say so, rather than to claim that he had forgotten it.

  “He said it was shoes.”

  Isabel was silent. Shoes. Italian shoes: elegant, beautifully designed, but always, always too small for Isabel’s feet. My Scottish-American feet, she thought, so much
larger than Italian feet.

  Cat smiled at her; she had dispelled the suspicions which her aunt had expressed over Salvatore’s family business. Perhaps it had been embarrassment over shoes, which were, after all, somewhat prosaic items.

  “And what else did you do?” asked Isabel at last. “Apart from these lunch parties with Salvatore and the Salvatore family. Turismo?”

  “We went to see Etna.”

  “On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking,” said Isabel. “Lawrence wrote that in his curious snake poem. You know the one, where a snake comes to his water trough, and he’s in his pyjamas for the heat, and he throws a rock at the snake. Auden never threw rocks at snakes, and that’s the crucial difference, isn’t it: writers who would throw rocks at snakes and those who wouldn’t. Hemingway would, wouldn’t he?” She smiled at Cat, who was shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, and looking at her with what Isabel always described as her patient look.

  “I digress. I know,” Isabel went on. “But I always think of Etna smoking. And of Lawrence in his pyjamas.”

  Cat took control of the conversation. Isabel could talk for hours about anything, unless stopped. “That was with a cousin of Salvatore’s, Tomasso. He’s from Palermo. They live in a large Baroque palazzo. He’s fun. He took me to all sorts of places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”

  Isabel sat quite still. When Cat talked like this, about men being fun, it meant that she was interested in them, as she had been interested in Toby, with his crushed-strawberry trousers and his tedious skiing talk; as she had been interested in Geoff, the army officer who drank too much at parties and engaged in childish pranks, such as gluing people’s hats to the hatstand; as she had been interested in Henry, and David, and perhaps others.