Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Tomasso’s a rally driver,” said Cat. “He drives an old Bugatti. It’s a beautiful car—red and silver.”

  Isabel was noncommittal. At least Tomasso was at a safe distance . . .

  “And he’s bringing the car over to Scotland soon,” said Cat. “It’s being brought over by train and ferry. He wants to drive it around the Highlands and see a bit of Edinburgh. He thought he might stay in Edinburgh for a few weeks.”

  “When?” asked Isabel. There was resignation in her voice.

  “Next week, I think,” said Cat. “Or the week after that. He’s going to call me and let me know.”

  There was little more to be said on the subject. As they talked about the delicatessen and about what had happened there over the week, Isabel’s thoughts returned to one of the central issues of her moral life. She had determined long ago not to interfere in Cat’s affairs, no matter what the temptation to do so was. It was very easy to see what was best for one’s family, particularly when one did not have many relatives, but she understood how this offended the principle of autonomy, which holds, so stubbornly, that we must each be left to live our own lives as we see fit. This did not mean that we could do anything we liked—far from it—but it did mean that we had to make our own decisions as to what to do. And if this meant that we made bad choices, then we would have to be left with the making of those choices. Cat saw her destiny in men who would make her unhappy, precisely because they were inconstant, and selfish, and narcissistic. That was what she wanted to do, and she had to be allowed to do it.

  “You’re fond of him?” Isabel asked quietly, and Cat, knowing what the question was about, was guarded in her response. Perhaps she was fond of him. She would see.

  Isabel said nothing. She wondered for a moment what Tomasso would be like. Of course, if one bore in mind that he drove an old Bugatti and lived in a Baroque palazzo, then the answer was clear. He would be stylish, raffish no doubt, and he would make Cat unhappy, as she had been unhappy with the other men. And Jamie would be unhappy too, and would spend hours anxiously imagining Cat and Tomasso together, in the silver and red Bugatti, somewhere in Fife or Perthshire, on narrow, exhilarating roads.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SHE HAD SUGGESTED to Ian that they meet at her house, but when he telephoned her it was with a counter-invitation. He would like to take her to lunch, if he might, at the Scottish Arts Club in Rutland Square.

  “They do mackerel fillets for me,” he said. “Mackerel fillets and lettuce. But you can have something more substantial.”

  Isabel knew the Arts Club. She had friends who were members and she knew the club president, a dapper antiques dealer with an exquisitely pointed moustache. She had even thought of joining, but done nothing about it, and so her visits to the club were restricted to the occasional lunch and the annual Burns Supper. The Burns Supper, which took place on or about the anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth, was of variable quality. In a year when there was a good speaker, the address to the Immortal Memory could be moving. But the occasion could rapidly drift into maudlin reflections on the ploughman poet and his carousing in Ayrshire, nothing of which Scotland could be proud, she thought. There was nothing edifying in the profound consumption of whisky, she felt. Every Scottish poet, it seemed, had drunk too much, or written about drink, or written nonsense while under its influence. How much had been lost as a result—great screeds of unwritten poetry, whole decades of literature; lives unsung, hopes unrealised. And the same could be said of Scottish composers, or at least some of them—the sixth Earl of Kellie, for example, who had composed such fine fiddle music but who had often been drunk and who, it was said, laughed so much at his own jokes that he would turn purple. That, of course, was a marvellous social detail; one could forgive a great deal in a man who turned purple in such circumstances. One might even love such a figure.

  Not that she laid the blame at the door of the Arts Club, before which she now stood, awaiting admission by one of the staff. Members had their own keys, but guests must wait until a member arrived or the secretary heard the bell. Isabel pressed the bell again and then looked back, over her shoulder, at the Rutland Square Gardens. Rutland Square was one of the finest squares in Georgian Edinburgh, tucked away at the west end of Princes Street, behind the great red sandstone edifice of the Caledonian Hotel. The gardens in the centre were not large, but had a number of well-established trees, which shaded the stone of the surrounding buildings. In spring the grass was covered with a riot of crocuses, impossible purples and yellows, and in summer, at lunchtime, it was lain upon during brief moments of sun by people from the nearby offices, pale secretaries and clerks in their shirtsleeves, just as Isabel and her friends at the Ladies’ College in George Square had stretched out on the grass and watched the students from the university, the boys in particular, and waited for their real lives to start.

  Every part of Edinburgh had memories for Isabel, as any resident of any city remembers the places where things happened, the corners where there had been a coffee bar a long time ago, or the building in which she had had her first job, the scene of an assignation, a disappointment or triumph. While she waited for the door to be opened, Isabel looked across the square to the corner where her friend Duncan had lived in his bachelor days. Behind an unassuming, black door was a common stone stair, winding and well-trodden over the years, that led up to four separate flats, one of them Duncan’s. And what parties had been conducted under that roof: parties that only started when everything else had finished; evenings of long conversations, one of which she remembered had ended with the arrival of the fire brigade when a spark from a log in the fireplace had started a smouldering fire in the floorboards—not anybody’s fault, as the firemen had pointed out as they stood in the kitchen later on and accepted a glass of whisky, and then another, and one after that, and had ended up singing with Duncan and his guests: My brother Bill’s a fireman bold/He pits oot fires. At the end, when the six firemen had made their way down the stair, one had remarked that it was a fine class of fire that one attended in Rutland Square, which was undoubtedly true. And another, the one who had proposed to Isabel in the kitchen, only to withdraw the offer ten minutes later on the grounds that he thought that he might already be married, had waved at her as he disappeared downstairs and doffed his fire helmet.

  The door was opened. Inside the club, Isabel made her way upstairs to the large L-shaped sitting room—the smoking room—where members congregated. It was a room filled with light, with two large ceiling-to-floor windows at the front, overlooking the square and its trees, and another large window at the back, looking down onto the mews behind Shandwick Place. There were two fireplaces, a grand piano, and comfortable red leather bench seats running along one wall, like the seats of an old parliament somewhere, in some forgotten corner of the Commonwealth.

  The Arts Club usually had an exhibition of paintings hanging in the smoking room, sometimes by members, many of whom were artists. This exhibition was by a member, and Isabel picked up the explanatory sheet and examined the works. They were a mixture of small portraits and watercolours of domestic scenes. She recognised the subjects of a number of the portraits, and was impressed by the likenesses: Lord Prosser, a brilliant, good man standing against a background of the Pentland Hills; Richard Demarco in an empty theatre, smiling optimistically. And then there was another one, a large picture that dominated the wall behind the piano, a portrayal of pride, an actor whom Isabel knew very slightly but who was well known in general, standing with a self-satisfied sneer on his face, a curl of the lip, pure arrogance. Did he recognise himself in the likeness, she wondered, or did he not see himself as others saw him? Burns had said that, of course, and it had been repeated at the last but one Burns Supper downstairs, in a bucolic address given by a former moderator of the Church of Scotland: the gift to gie us/to see ourselves as ithers see us.

  “Yes,” said a voice at her shoulder. “That’s him, isn’t it? She’s really summed him up, hasn’t she? L
ook at the eyebrows.”

  Isabel turned round to see Ian standing behind her.

  “One might have to keep one’s voice down,” said Isabel. “He could be a member here.”

  “Not grand enough for him,” said Ian. “The New Club is more his territory.”

  Isabel smiled. “Look at this portrait here,” she said, pointing to another of the pictures. A man sat in his study, one hand on a pile of books and the other resting on a blotter. Behind him was a window in which a steep hillside of rhododendrons was visible.

  “That’s a very different person altogether,” said Ian. “I know that man.”

  “As it happens,” said Isabel, “so do I.”

  They looked at the picture together. Isabel leant forward to examine the painting more closely. “Isn’t it extraordinary how experience writes itself on the face?” she said. “Experience and attitude—they both reveal themselves in the physical. One can understand people turning leathery, as Australians sometimes do, and one can understand how the pleasures of the table lead to fleshy jowls, but what is it that makes the spiritual face so different from the face of the venal? Especially with the eyes—how can the eyes be so different?”

  “It’s how we read the face,” said Ian. “Remember that you’re talking to a psychologist. We like to think about things like that. It’s a question of numerous little signals that create the overall impression.”

  “But how do internal states show themselves physically?”

  “Very easily,” said Ian. “Think of anger. The knitted brow. Think of determination. The gritted teeth.”

  “And intelligence?” asked Isabel. “What’s the difference between an intelligent face and an unintelligent one? And don’t tell me that there isn’t a difference—there is.”

  “Liveliness and engagement with the world,” said Ian. “The vacuous face shows neither of these.”

  Isabel gazed at the painting of the good, and then looked at the painting of the proud. In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not any more. The proud man could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.

  They went down to lunch, choosing one of the few private tables at the rear of the dining room. The main tables, both round, were filling up. One was presided over by a Scotsman journalist who held court in the club three days a week; at the other table a gaggle of lawyers sat, chuckling over some misfortune.

  “It was good of you to accept my invitation,” said Ian, as he poured Isabel a glass of water. “After all, I was a perfect stranger when we bumped into one another the other day.”

  “That’s what you thought,” said Isabel. “But I know more about you than you think.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “How?”

  “You told me that you were a psychologist,” Isabel explained. “I telephoned a psychologist friend and found out all I needed to know.”

  “Which was?”

  “That you had a distinguished career. That you were almost given a personal chair here in Edinburgh. That you published a lot. That’s about it.”

  He laughed. “And I know about you,” he said.

  Isabel sighed. “Scotland is a village.”

  “Yes,” went on Ian. “But so is everywhere. New Yorkers say that about New York. And of course now we have the global village.”

  Isabel thought about that for a moment. If we lived in a global village, then the boundaries of our responsibility were greatly extended. The people dying of poverty, the sick, the dispossessed, were our neighbours even if they were far away. And that changed a great deal.

  “I asked our mutual friend Peter Stevenson about you,” Ian continued. “He can tell you just about anything. And he said that you were, well, who you are. He also said that you had a reputation for discreetly looking into things.”

  “That’s a polite way of putting it,” said Isabel. “Some would call it indecent curiosity. Nosiness, even.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with taking an interest in the world,” said Ian. “I’m curious about the world too. I like to speculate as to what lies behind the surface.”

  “If anything,” interjected Isabel. “Sometimes the surface is all there is.”

  “True, but not always true. Those pictures up there, for instance, the ones we’ve just been looking at: there’s so much behind each of them. But one would have to enquire. One would have to be a bit of a John Berger. You’ve seen his Ways of Seeing? It changed the way I look at things. Completely.”

  “I picked it up a long time ago,” said Isabel. “Yes, it makes scales drop from the eyes.”

  The waitress arrived at their table, placing a small plate of bread and butter before them. Ian reached out and pushed it over towards Isabel.

  “We had a conversation the other day,” he said. “Or we started it, rather. I told you about how it felt to have heart surgery. But I didn’t get very far.”

  Isabel watched him. She had decided that she liked him, that she appreciated his openness and his willingness to engage with issues, but now she found herself wondering whether this was to be an operation conversation. People liked to talk about their medical problems—for some it was the most interesting of all subjects—but surely Ian could not have sought her out purely as a sympathetic ear for an operation saga.

  It was as if she had given voice to her reservations. “Don’t worry, I don’t intend to burden you with the details,” he said quickly. “There’s nothing worse than hearing about the medical problems of others. No, that’s not the issue.”

  Isabel looked at him politely. “I don’t mind,” she said. “A friend told me about her ingrown toenail the other day. It was quite a saga. It took her half an hour. Do you know that once the toenail starts to . . .” She stopped, and smiled.

  Ian continued. “I wanted to tell you about something quite . . . well, quite unsettling I suppose is the word. Would you mind?”

  Isabel shook her head. The waitress had returned with their plates and had placed a helping of mackerel fillets and salad in front of Ian. He thanked her and gazed, with resignation, Isabel thought, at the meal before him. She listened as he began to talk, telling her briefly that he had become ill suddenly, after a massive viral attack, and that his heart, quite simply, had given out. He told of receiving the news that he would need a heart transplant and of his feeling of calm, which surprised even him.

  “I found that I really didn’t mind,” he said. “I thought it highly unlikely that a donor would be found in time and that I would be going. I felt no great regrets. I just felt this extraordinary sense of calm. I was astonished.”

  The call for the operation came suddenly. He had been out for a walk, at the Canongate Kirk, in fact, and had been fetched. They told him later that he had travelled over to Glasgow with the donor heart, which was in a container beside him, as the donor had come from Edinburgh. That was all that they said about that, as the donor’s family had wished to remain anonymous. All he knew was that it was a young man, because they had used the male pronoun when they spoke to him about it and they had said that the heart was young.

  “I don’t remember a great deal of the next few weeks,” he said. “I lay there in my bed in Glasgow, not knowing what day it was. I drifted in and out of sleep. And then, I slowly came back to life, or that’s what it seemed like. I thought I could feel my new heart, beating within me. I lay and listened to its rhythms, echoed in a machine that they had linked me to. And I felt a curious sadness, a feeling of disjointedness. It was as if my past had been taken away from me and I was adrift. I found that I had nothing to say to anybody. People tried to coax me into conversation, but I just felt this great emptiness. There was nothing for me to say.

  “I am told that all of this is quite normal. People feel like that after major heart surg
ery. And it did get better—once I was home I recovered my sense of who I was. I felt more cheerful. The emptiness, which was probably some form of depression, disappeared and I began to read books and see friends. At that point I began to feel gratitude—just immense gratitude—to the doctors and the person whose heart I had been given. I wanted to thank the family, but the doctors said that I should respect their desire for anonymity. Sometimes I thought of the donor, whoever he was, and just wept. I suppose that in a sense I was mourning him—I was mourning the death of somebody whom I didn’t know, even whose name was unknown to me.

  “I would have loved to have been able to speak to the family. I wrote a letter to them to thank them. You can imagine how difficult it was to do that—to find the words that could do justice to my feelings. When I read the letter over, it sounded stilted to me, but there was nothing I could do about that. It had to be passed on through the doctors—I wonder if the family read it and thought that it sounded formal, and forced. I hate to think that they might have thought that I was writing out of a sense of duty—a formal thank-you letter. But what else could I do?”

  He paused, as if expecting a response. Isabel had been listening intently. She had been intrigued by the idea of frustrated gratitude. Should one let people express their gratitude properly, even if one is embarrassed or reluctant to do so? There is an art in accepting a present, and indeed there is sometimes an obligation to let others give. Perhaps the family should have allowed him to meet them, and to thank them properly; one cannot put just any condition one wishes on a gift, a condition should not be unreasonable or demeaning. Isabel had always thought that legacies which stipulated that the beneficiaries should change their names were fundamentally offensive.

  “You had no alternative,” she said. “That’s all you could do. But I think that they might have allowed you to speak with them. You could argue that they had no right to insist on anonymity, given the natural desire that you would have to express your gratitude.”