Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They really would. Yours sincerely, Isabel Dalhousie.

  Isabel put the thought of vice behind her and turned her attention back to Cat. “It may be difficult,” she said. “But I think I’ll manage.”

  “You can say no,” said Cat.

  “Can, but shall not,” said Isabel. “You go to the wedding.”

  Cat smiled. “I’ll reciprocate some day,” she said. “I’ll be you for a few weeks and you can go away.”

  “You could never be me,” said Isabel. “And I could never be you. We never know enough about another person to be him or her. We think we do, but we can never be sure.”

  “You know what I mean,” said Cat. “I’ll come and live here and reply to your letters and so on while you get away.”

  Isabel nodded. “I’ll bear that in mind. But there’s no need to think of reciprocation. I suspect that I shall enjoy myself.”

  “You will,” said Cat. “You’ll enjoy the customers—or some of them.”

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  CAT S TAY E D, and they ate a light supper in the garden room, enjoying the last of the evening sun. It was June—close to the solstice—and it never became truly dark in Edinburgh, even at midnight. The summer had been slow to come, but had now arrived and the days were long and warm.

  “I’ve been feeling lazy in this weather,” Isabel remarked to Cat. “Working in your shop is exactly what I need to wake me up.”

  “And Italy is exactly what I need to wind me down,” said Cat.

  “Not that the wedding itself should be quiet—anything but.”

  Isabel enquired who was getting married. She knew few of Cat’s friends, and tended to get them mixed up. There were too many Kirstys and Craigs, Isabel thought; they had become interchangeable in her mind.

  “Kirsty,” said Cat. “You’ve met her with me once or twice, I think.”

  “Oh,” said Isabel. “Kirsty.”

  “She met an Italian last year when she was teaching English in Catania. Salvatore. They fell for one another and that was it.”

  For a moment Isabel was silent. She had fallen for John Liamor in Cambridge all those years ago, and that had been it too. She had gone so far as to marry him and had tolerated his unfaithfulness until it had been too much to bear. But all these Kirstys were so sensible; they would not make a bad choice.

  “What does he do?” Isabel asked. She half expected Cat not to know; it always surprised her that her niece seemed uninterested in, or unaware of, what people did. For Isabel, it was fundamentally important information if one were even to begin to understand somebody.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat smiled. “Kirsty doesn’t really know,” she said. “I know that’ll surprise you, but she says that whenever she’s asked Salvatore he’s become evasive. He says that he’s some sort of busi-nessman who works for his father. But she can’t find out exactly what this business is.”

  Isabel stared at Cat. It was clear to her—immediately clear—what Salvatore’s father did.

  “And she doesn’t care?” Isabel ventured. “She’s still prepared to marry him?”

  “Why not?” said Cat. “Just because you don’t know what happens in somebody’s office doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t marry them.”

  “But what if this . . . this office is headquarters of a protection racket? What then?”

  Cat laughed. “A protection racket? Don’t be ridiculous.

  There’s nothing to suggest that it’s a protection racket.”

  Isabel thought that any accusations of ridiculousness were being made in exactly the wrong direction.

  “Cat,” she said quietly. “It’s Italy. In the south of Italy if you won’t disclose what you do, then it means one thing. Organised crime. That’s just the way it is. And the most common form of organised crime is the protection racket.”

  Cat stared at her aunt. “Nonsense,” she said. “You have an overheated imagination.”

  “And Kirsty’s is distinctly underheated,” retorted Isabel. “I simply can’t imagine marrying somebody who would hide that sort of thing from me. I couldn’t marry a gangster.”

  “Salvatore’s not a gangster,” said Cat. “He’s nice. I met him several times and I liked him.”

  Isabel looked at the floor. The fact that Cat could say this merely emphasised her inability to tell good men from bad. This F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  Kirsty was in for a rude awakening, with her handsome young mafioso husband. He would want a compliant, unquestioning wife, who would look the other way when it came to his dealings with his cronies. A Scotswoman was unlikely to understand this; she would expect equality and consideration, which this Salvatore would not give her once they were married. It was a disaster in the making, and Isabel thought that Cat simply could not see it, as she had been unable to see through Toby, her previous boyfriend; he of the Lladró porcelain looks and the tendency to wear crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers. Perhaps Cat would come back from Italy with an Italian of her own.

  Now that would be interesting.

  C H A P T E R T W O

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  WHEN IT CAME TO a Queen’s Hall concert, Isabel Dalhousie had a strategy. The hall had been a church, and the upstairs gallery, which ran round three sides of the hall, was designed to be uncomfortable. The Church of Scotland had always believed that one should sit up straight, especially when the minister was in full flow, and this principle had been embodied in its Scottish ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, the upstairs seats prevented any leaning back, and indeed were inimical to too much spreading out in any direction. For this reason, Isabel would attend concerts in the Queen’s Hall only if she could arrange a ticket for downstairs, where ordinary seats, rather than pews, were set out in the main body of the kirk, and only in the first few rows which afforded a reasonable view of the stage.

  Her friend Jamie had arranged the ticket for her that evening, and he knew all about her requirements.

  “Third row from the front,” he assured her on the telephone. “On the aisle. Perfect.”

  “And who’ll be sitting next to me?” Isabel asked. “Perfection implies an agreeable neighbour.”

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  Jamie laughed. “Somebody wonderful,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what I asked for.”

  “Last time I was in the Queen’s Hall,” Isabel observed, “I had that strange man from the National Library. You know, the one who’s the expert on Highland place names, and who fidgets.

  Nobody will sit next to him normally, and I believe he was actually hit over the head with a rolled-up programme at a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert—out of sheer irritation. No excuse, of course, but understandable. I have, of course, never hit anybody with a programme. Not once.”

  Jamie laughed. This was a typical Isabel comment, and it delighted him. Everybody else was so literal; she could turn a situation on its head and render it painfully funny by some peculiar observation. “Maybe it’s the way the music takes him,”

  he said. “My pupils fidget a lot.”

  Jamie was a musician, a bassoonist who supplemented his earnings as a member of a chamber orchestra with the proceeds of teaching. His pupils were mostly teenagers, who traipsed up the stairs of his Stockbridge flat once a week for their lessons.

  For the most part they were promising players, but there were several who attended under parental duress, and these were the ones who fidgeted or looked out of the window.

  Isabel enjoyed a close friendship with Jamie—or at least as close a friendship as could flourish across an age gap of fifteen years. She had met him during the six months that he had spent with Cat, and she had been disappointed when her niece and this good-looking young man, with his sallow complexion and his en brosse haircut, had separated. It was entirely Cat’s doing, and it had taken all of Isabel’s self-re
straint not to upbraid her niece for what she saw as a disastrous mistake. Jamie was a gift: a wonderful, gentle gift from the gods—sent straight down from 1 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Parnassus—and Cat was walking away from him. How could she possibly do it?

  Over the months that followed, the torch which Jamie continued to carry for Cat had been kept alight by Isabel. She had barely discussed the matter with him, but there was an unspoken understanding that Jamie was still part of the family, as it were, and that by remaining in contact with Isabel, the chance of a resumption of the affair was at least kept alive. But the bond between them had gone deeper than that. It appeared that Jamie needed a confidante, and Isabel fulfilled that role with instinctive sympathy. And for her part, she enjoyed Jamie’s company immensely: he sang while she accompanied him on the piano; she cooked meals for him; they gossiped—all of which he appeared to enjoy as much as she did.

  She was content with what she had in this friendship. She knew that she could telephone Jamie at any time and that he would come up from his flat in Saxe-Coburg Street and share a glass of wine and talk. From time to time they went out for dinner together, or to a concert when Jamie had spare tickets. He took it for granted that she would be at every performance of his chamber orchestra, in Edinburgh or in Glasgow, and she was, although Isabel did not enjoy going through to Glasgow. Such an unsettling city, she confessed. And Jamie smiled: what was unsettling about Glasgow was that it was real; there was a meatiness about life in Glasgow that was quite different from the rarefied atmosphere of Edinburgh. And of course he liked that: he had studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and remembered a student life of late-night parties and bars and dinners in cheap Indian restaurants off the Byres Road, all against the smell of the river and the sound of the ships and the factories.

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  Now, sitting in her seat in the third row—as promised—

  Isabel studied the programme for that evening’s concert. It was a charity concert in aid of a Middle East relief fund, and an eclectic selection of local musicians had offered their services.

  There was a Haydn cello concerto, a ragbag of Bach, and a selection of anthems from the Edinburgh Academy Chorus. Jamie’s chamber orchestra was not performing that night, but he was playing the contrabassoon in an impromptu ensemble that was to accompany the singers. Isabel ran her eye down the list of performers: almost all of them were known to her.

  She settled back in her seat and glanced up towards the gallery. A young child, the younger sister perhaps of one of the members of the Academy Chorus, was gazing down over the parapet, met her eye, and lifted a hand in a hesitant wave. Isabel waved back, and smiled. Behind the child, she saw the figure of the man from the National Library—he went to every concert, and fidgeted at them all.

  The hall was now almost full, and only a few latecomers were still to find their way to their seats. Isabel looked down at her programme and then, discreetly, glanced at her neighbour on the left. She was a middle-aged woman with her hair tied back in a bun and a vaguely disapproving expression on her face.

  A thin-faced man, drained of colour, sat beside her, staring up at the ceiling. The man glanced at the woman, and then looked away. The woman looked at the man, and then half turned to face Isabel on the pretext of adjusting the red paisley shawl she had about her shoulders.

  “Such an interesting programme,” whispered Isabel. “A real treat.”

  The woman’s expression softened. “We hear so little Haydn,”

  she said, almost conspiratorially. “They don’t give us enough.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

  “I suppose not,” said Isabel, but she wondered: Precisely who took it upon themselves to ration Haydn?

  “They need to wake up,” muttered the man. “When did they last do The Creation? Can you remember? I can’t.”

  Isabel looked back at her programme, as if to assess the quota of Haydn, but the lights were dimmed and the members of a string quartet appeared from the door at the back of the stage to take their places. There was enthusiastic applause led, it seemed to Isabel, by her neighbours.

  “Haydn,” whispered the woman, transformed. And the man nodded.

  Isabel suppressed a smile. The world, she supposed, was full of enthusiasts and fans of one kind or another. There were people who loved all sorts of extraordinary things and lived for their passions. Haydn was a perfectly respectable passion, as were trains, she supposed. W. H. Auden, or WHA as she called him, had appreciated steam engines, and had confessed that when he was a boy he had loved a steam engine which he thought “every bit as beautiful” as a person to whom his poem was addressed. You are my steam engine, one might say, in much the same way as the French addressed their lovers as mon petit chou, my little cabbage. How strange was human passion in its expression.

  The quartet tuned up and then began their Haydn, which they played with distinction and which in due course prompted rapturous applause from Isabel’s row. This was followed by the Bach, which took them up to the interval. Isabel often remained in her seat during intervals, but it was a warm evening and thirst drove her into the bar, where she joined a line of people waiting for drinks. Fortunately the service was efficient and she did not have to wait long. Nursing her white wine F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  spritzer, she made her way to one of the small tables under the mezzanine.

  She looked at the milling crowd. A few people greeted her from the other side of the room—with nods of the head and smiles. Where was Jamie? she wondered. He would be playing immediately after the interval and might be in the green room, preparing his bassoon reed. She would see him after the concert, she imagined, and they might enjoy a drink together, discussing the performance.

  Then she saw him, standing in a knot of people in the corner of the bar. One of them she recognised as another member of the chamber orchestra, a young man called Brian, who came from Aberdeen and who played the viola. And then, immediately next to Jamie, a tall girl, with blond hair and wearing a strappy red dress, who was holding a drink in her left hand and talking, and who now turned and leant up against Jamie. Isabel watched. She saw Jamie smile at the girl and place a hand on her shoulder, lightly, and then his hand moved up and brushed the hair from her forehead, and she returned his smile and slipped her free arm round his waist.

  Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air.

  She put down her glass and stared at the table for a few moments before she raised her eyes again and looked in their direction.

  Jamie was looking at his watch and saying something to the viola player, and to the girl too, and then he unwound himself from her clasp and moved off towards the green-room door and the girl looked at one of the paintings on the wall—amateurish, characterless landscapes that the Queen’s Hall was trying in vain to sell.

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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 stood up. Making her way back to the hall she had to walk past the girl, but she did not look at her. Back in her seat she sat down heavily, as if dazed, and stared at the programme.

  She saw Jamie’s name and the name of the viola player, and her heart was beating hard within her.

  She watched as the players assembled, and then the Academy Chorus, young singers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, the boys in white shirts and dark trousers and the girls in their white blouses and navy blue pleated skirts. Then the conductor came on, and she watched him rather than look directly at Jamie, who seemed to be looking for her now, to smile discreetly at her in the audience as he often did.

  They began with Howells, which Isabel hardly heard. Who was this girl? There was no girlfriend—not since Cat—and she had simply assumed that there wo
uld not be one. He had always made it clear that he wanted Cat back, and would wait for as long as it took. And she, Isabel, had gone along with this, and all the time what was happening was that she was becoming increasingly possessive of Jamie without ever having to acknowledge it. Now there was another woman, a girl really, and there was an obvious intimacy between them which would exclude her, as it would have to do, and that would be the end of everything.

  When the Howells finished, she stole a glance at Jamie, but looked away again quickly because she fancied that he was looking at another part of the hall, where perhaps the girl was sitting. The chorus moved on to a Taverner motet, grave and echoing, and then to a John Ireland anthem, “Many Waters Cannot Quench Love.” Isabel listened now. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. No they cannot; they cannot. Love is as strong as death; it is stronger; it is stronger.

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  At the end of the concert, she stood up as soon as the applause had abated. Normally she would have left by the back door, through the bar, where she would have seen Jamie coming out of the green room, but not this evening. She was one of the first out, into the busy night street where there were people about with business other than concerts. Then she walked briskly towards the Meadows, following the path beside the traffic, walking quickly, as if in a rush to get home; though nothing awaited her at home but the solace of the familiar.

  The night sky was still light, a glow to the west, and it was warm. Many waters cannot quench love: the anthem’s setting remained in her ears, repeating itself; a tune so powerful that it might gird one against the disappointments of life, rather than make one aware that our attempts to subdue the pain of unre-quited love—of impossible love, of love that we are best to put away and not to think about—tended not to work, and only made the wounds of love more painful.